Headhunter: The Assessment Weekend 2010 - REVIEW

I did something this weekend, I haven’t done in a very long time. I took a whole day and just vegged out on movies. Since my internet has been out for a solid week now, I had to resort to watching Netflix on my iPad… sideways since they implemented this stupid “landscape only” mode… but don’t worry I was able to see it well enough to know good from bad.

A motley group of business students in Berlin, Germany sign up for Takahashi Corp’s assessment weekend, hoping to land one of the coveted spots with the consulting company. Under the watchful eye of a company psychologist, the team-working and improvisational skills of the aspirants will be put to the test in a survival-type situation. But nothing goes according to plan. The group arrives to find the base camp completely destroyed. Trapped in the woods with no food, no shelter and no way to communicate with the outside world, the real characters of the students come to light as one by one they start to loose their heads.
That’s their synopsis… Here is mine.
A group of business students unwittingly sign up for an assessment weekend hoping to land a job with a popular consulting firm. They all go bat shit crazy and start acting like a bunch of fucking idiots five minutes after discovering the camp they were headed to has been destroyed. Cut off from the world in a dense forest, all these muckity mucks have to pull together to survive. Thank the horror Gods that they have the quiet, timid underachiever who can go all Rambo at the drop of a hat AND that the company psychologist brought his handy dandy pistol in his wittle nap sack.

Apart from some decent acting, the only two things this film has going for it is that it was well shot and has some pretty nice cinematography (at times). Other than that, it’s not great, it’s not good, it’s not really anything but a waste of time. There is little character development so when a character flips from one extreme to the other you’re really left just scratching your head wondering where in the fuck that came from. Take the character of Brad for example… he’s clearly made out to be at the bottom of the class, grade wise and wants to do whatever he can to please the company psychologist including kissing his ass even when he’s hitting on his girlfriend. BUT once out in the wilderness he takes the lead and turns into some psycho version of a super boy scout setting traps and barking orders at everyone in the name of “safety first”.

Headhunter: The Assessment Weekend is a cluster fuck of ideas all rolled into one that never really pan out. We all know that twist endings are all the rage these days but they have to be well done. ALSO, if you start your film off by showing a sequence of the final scene, your twist ending isn’t going to be successful because your audience already knows how it ends. Furthermore, revealing just about everything in your trailer is a big NO-NO if you're wanting that surprise element to your film. That was another one that left me scratching my head. Regardless of how much running around the woods was done, you can't expect people to want to watch your film when you don't even take the time to complete your IMDb page. If you want to watch a “company getaway” horror flick, check out Severance. It’s far superior and has everything this one doesn’t.