Reviewed - Severance: Glancing back at notes made during the screening of this gleefully unhinged slasher film, I find myself inadvertently assembling a terrifying magic-realist novel in my head, writes Donald Clarke.

The bit with the severed foot in the fridge was, apparently, quite good. The big-bosomed women do not, it seems, zip up their tunics before brandishing their sub-machine guns. The scene where a passenger plane - unseen before, never referred to again - gets accidentally blown from the air by a heat-seeking missile was, my jottings suggest, surprising even in a film so resistant to logic.

As you may have gathered, Severance is not going to fail for want of sheer, relentless stupidity. The director of Creep, a useless horror film, but a disciplined one, has decided to abandon structure for a drunken embrace of all things lowbrow. Here we have a Benny Hill parody. Over there we see a broad pastiche of silent horror. And so on.

In the film's defence, it almost succeeds through dint of its variety and robust unpretentiousness.

Almost. The sad fact - as anybody who has attended a school pantomime will attest - is that no amount of good-natured exertion will wholly obscure wooden dialogue, sloppy direction and indifferent acting.

Before taking its swerve down Barmy Alley, Severance comes across like any number of generic adventures in slaughter. Danny Dyer, an actor cheekier than any chappy I know, stars as an employee of an arms firm forced to join his colleagues on a work outing to a remote lodge in eastern Europe (actually, and inevitably, the Isle of Man).

When a fallen tree obstructs their coach's path, the one-dimensionally disparate work-mates - drab feminist, scruffy nerd, glacial babe - decide to leg it through the grim woods. Every horror known to the videoshop bargain bin awaits them.

It is only fair to point out that screenings at specialist festivals have, apparently, been greeted with loud cheers and much whooping.

Mind you, specialist audiences cheer during cockfights.