Rubber

Rubber

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Date: 11 April 2011

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Quentin Dupieux

Writer: Quentin Dupieux

Cast: Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser

France 2010

79 mins

Quentin ‘Mr Oizo’ Dupieux’s gamble of making a serial-killer thriller with a tyre in the role of the psychopath had Electric Sheep salivating in anticipation. It starts well, opening with a US cop in the desert warning spectators armed with binoculars that sometimes there is ‘no reason’ for what happens in films. Their entertainment programme begins when a tyre thrown away in the desert comes back to life and starts exterminating the animals in its path, blowing them up with the sheer force of its evil vibrations. So far so good, but all the deaths follow exactly the same pattern, so that it soon becomes very repetitive. Inventive cruelty is one of the essential ingredients of a good horror film and it is sorely lacking here. The tension and terror one could hope for fail to materialise, and it isn’t imaginatively surreal enough to hold the audience’s attention. A great idea, but ultimately a disappointingly underwhelming experience.

Rubber screens at Sheffield Showroom Cinema presented by Celluloid Screams on Tuesday 5 April and at The Ritzy (London) presented by Midnight Movies and Culture Shock on Friday 8 April.

Virginie Sélavy