Panic Button
Panic Button DVD (Chris Crow, Cine-Britannia 2010)
After winning a free holiday on international social networking site Facebo- sorry, ‘All2gethr.com’, – four young adults find themselves on a private luxury jet heading for a fabulous weekend in New York. Their host for the trip is Alligator, an enigmatic onscreen avatar who sounds a lot like Richard Burton. Through their in-seat computer screens, Alligator encourages them to enjoy the free champagne and get to know each other better as they settle down for the first round of a competition that will earn the winner lots of free goodies. At first the questions, which are all based on their online history, are designed to embarrass the quartet – one is revealed to have had his scrotum pierced, another once bought cream over the ‘net to treat genital warts and so on – but when one of them is revealed to have watched a rape porn film called ‘Too Young To Run’ and another to have circulated an online snuff movie among her friends, the trip quickly starts to turn sour. Discovering that the plane is heading to a mystery location and that they have been tricked into thinking that the trip is genuine, the four strangers try to work out why they have been targeted and realise that they are all somehow linked to an incident from their past. With his guests refusing to play on, Alligator reveals that they don’t have a choice: if they back out now, he will randomly select a friend from their home page, kill them and post the murder online for posterity… Tapping into the same vein that Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson used in the recent ‘Scream 4’, ‘Panic Button’ makes its points about the dehumanising effects of modern technology and our willingness to go online and share the most intimate aspects of our lives with complete strangers with far greater success. It’s a clever, literate film that uses the airplane setting to claustrophobic effect, and draws upon issues such as cyber-bullying, identity theft and voyeurism to drive its action forward. It’s also nice to see such an accomplished, well-made movie having been produced in Wales – scanning the credits, I realised that I even knew a couple of the crew on a personal level, so I’m doubly pleased to be able to thoroughly recommend this tight, tense thriller. Liam Ronan
