Jonathan Romney 

Cub review – visually stylish Belgian chiller

An eccentric build-up and some ingenious booby-trappery can’t quite compensate for the plotting holes in this cub scout slasher movie
  
  

cub
There’s something feral beyond the campfire … Maurice Luijten in Cub. Photograph: PR

Here’s a novelty: a slasher movie about cub scouts. It’s also Belgian – and whatever the Friday the 13th series had going for it, it didn’t have subtexts about Franco-Flemish cultural tensions. In Jonas Govaerts’s visually stylish chiller, a boy goes camping with a troop that’s run along Lord of the Flies lines, only to encounter something feral lurking just beyond the campfire. The build-up is entertainingly eccentric, and there’s some ingenious booby-trappery at work among the pines, but Cub runs dry once it knuckles down to the routine bloodletting. And when it comes to plotting, Govaerts and co-writer Roel Mondelaers don’t quite earn their basic knots badge.

 

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