Justin Head’s South African horror “Night Drive” is a pathetic feature film, a gory and insulting attempt at tension and suspense where capable actors do their best to take the screenplay seriously. In this, they are more successful than we are. Christopher Beasley, Corine du Toit, Greg Melvill-Smith and Brandon Auret star, and while we pretend not to notice that half the South African soapie circuit is in the film (hey, it’s Robert Whitehead!), we cannot miss, or forgive, the ineptitude of the writing. The awfulness of the screenplay is “Night Drive’s” downfall, since the film is technically quite polished even if the camera is sometimes too self-consciously jerky.
In “Night Drive”, a handful of tourists – the elderly British couple; the yuppie Black couple; the struggling mismatched couple – are taken on a night drive in a South African game reserve. Some poachers have been using the reserve as a hunting ground over the past weeks, and not just because they hunt animals… they hunt humans too, to use their organs in muti (black magic). And muti is stronger when the organs are taken from the victim while he or she is still alive. Muti is a shocking reality in some of the northern provinces of South Africa especially, but the film simply uses it to form part of its genre exercise. The key figure behind these poachers-hunters is the mystical Hyena Man, who feeds human remains to his hyena kin at the start of the film. (Later, the Hyena Man will hear the hyenas calling in the wild, and refer to them as his children – have the filmmakers really not seen at least one version of “Dracula”? If they have, and this is a reference to Stoker’s creation, it is one of the film’s worst moments.)
I am going to discuss the film in more detail now. If you plan on seeing “Night Drive”, stop reading now and ask yourself if you really have the time and will to subject yourself to it. It really is a terrible film.
Spoilers follow.
Cliched and devoid of solid characters, “Night Drive” invites the viewer to take out a horror genre checklist to see how many un-surprising twists the film gives you (not many, and the major revelation is not much of a revelation at all) and also to play the “who dies next?” game. After decades of horror, who would’ve thought that in a South African horror film, the black person still dies first? In fact, it is firstly the black female who has her breast and arm cut off; secondly, seconds later, her black boyfriend has his genitals removed. And what about the elderly couple – do they make it? No. They are built into the story only for some demographic purpose, I guess, before being dispatched of without ceremony. What about handsome and tortured hero Sean (Beasley) and the equally tortured Karen (Du Toit) – do they make it? And is there a bit of a spark between them?
Tortured Sean’s trauma originates from an earlier incident where, in pursuit of a criminal, he shot and killed not only said thug but also a female civilian. The movie revisits this moment a few times. The film is lame enough to, predictably, recreate this moment at the end, when the Hyena Man grabs Karen and threatens to cut her throat, telling Sean to put the gun down. You don’t need me to tell you that Sean does not put the gun down and manages to save Karen. Please note that before Sean comes face to face with the Hyena Man in this final confrontation, he finds his father’s (Greg Melvill-Smith) corpse. He puts his gun down and instead picks up a panga with which to face the poachers who are armed to the teeth with knives, pangas and automatic weapons. Clearly this does not make sense, and to add insult to injury, Sean’s surname… is Darwin.
The film’s other great problem is an ideological one: it detests its female characters, killing almost every single one of them with the exception of Karen, who has apparently survived a previous rape prior to the film’s events only to endure further extreme victimisation and, possibly, a future with an equally psychologically scarred Sean.
Such are the problems that plague the film, including some horrible dialogue:
Karen: “Fuck you!”
Potential poacher and rapist: “Fuck me? No, fuck you!”
There’s even a retread of the classic “there are things worse than death” line, and – oh, come on, they make it too easy.
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