Mike McCahill 

Dartmoor Killing review – low-budget thriller starts well, goes downhill

Take away the gore in Peter Nicholson’s story of young hikers and you’d have an attractive promo for Dartmoor tourism
  
  

Dartmoor Killing
Rambling gone wrong … Dartmoor Killing Photograph: PR

Peter Nicholson’s low-budget horror-thriller starts better than it ends. As two young hikers (Gemma-Leah Devereux, Rebecca Night) are led off the beaten track by a hunky guide (Callum Blue), the first act’s every set-up benefits from the screen-filling backdrops of the eponymous moors. It’s disappointing, then, that Nicholson should retreat from this spectacular stage to a farmhouse haunted by mysterious deaths; doubly so when the relationships, dialogue and action all stop ringing true. Redact the gore, and it’d make an attractive promo for Dartmoor tourism, but A Night in the Woods (2012) hounded its characters far more persuasively over this particular terrain.

 

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