Blunt force trauma.
It probably helps, when considering Olly Blackburn’s Donkey Punch, to think of the character who receives said punch. She’s a young, vivacious woman who indulges in various modes of improper behavior — drug usage, wanton sexuality, general immoral attitude — until an application of the urban-legend sexual move by a mousy young man who gets a little too excited over a rare sexual encounter leaves her a broken-necked corpse. Similarly, the film indulges itself in a grotesque, depressingly dull pantomime of youthful decadence until the titular act, at which point it collapses, twitching occasionally before expiring an hour later. The structure of the film (half an hour of hedonism culminating in an over-the-line act, followed by an hour of pitiless retribution and death) practically invites a cold, moralistic reading, and the fact that Blackburn mostly shows us these people at their most loathsome doesn’t help matters, yet accusing it of brutal finger-wagging gives it too much credit; while there’s a dollop of Last House on the Left in the film’s DNA, it lacks the intellectual aspirations of the Craven work. Think about that for a minute — this is a film that doesn’t even muster the vague scraps of thought managed by the bare-bones bastard that is Last House. Take it for the calling card it is and consign it to the dusty bin of history.
