DVD Review: Stag Night

Stag Night is the latest addition to the subgenre of horror movies dealing with the bad things going down on underground subway systems and manages to be a mildly diverting exercise in low-budget horror.

The titular Stag Night’s recipient is Mike, an everyman bachelor (played enthusiastically by Kip Pardue, familiar to genre fans from the Wizard of Gore remake) who is celebrating his last days of singledom in New York City with friends Carl (Scott Adkins) and Joe (Karl Geary) and his brother Tony (Breckin Meyer.) After being kicked out of a strip club, the group decide to take a train uptown to continue drinking and end up sharing a carriage with Michelle, a stripper from the club (Sarah Barrand) and her friend Brita (Vinessa Shaw). After Tony offends the two girls, Brita sprays him with mace, and the whole group ends up (inexplicably) getting off the train. Unsurprisingly, the train pulls away and the group is stranded in an abandoned subway station in the dark with no phone signal. Pretty soon, the group split up to search for a way out and end up discovering the Subway’s feral inhabitants hacking a security guard to pieces. The group soon become unwitting prey to the subterranean killers and must fight to survive the night.

Though it shares subject matter with any number of similarly-plotted films such as Christopher Smith’s Creep and Gary Sherman’s classic Deathline (a.k.a. Raw Meat), Stag Night still manages to be entertaining, largely due some inventive death scenes and the performances of Pardue and Shaw. Unfortunately, the script rarely deviates from corny stereotypes and predictable plot devices (including an awkward explanation of the origin of the term ‘Stag Night’, which according to one character is the olden days name for a bachelor party – despite the fact that the term is actually still used in the UK.) There is also a severe reliance on slow motion and shaky camerawork, the latter of which is so dizzying it actually distracts from the action rather than heightening the tension. Stag Night could really have done with a few new ideas to get some more weight behind it to raise it above its status as a run-of-the-mill DTV horror film, but it rattles along at a solid pace throughout its 84-minute running time and has enough gory highlights to satisfy the post-pub crowd.

Stag Night is out now on DVD and Blu Ray from Kaleidoscope Entertainment, certificate 18.