If there's one thing I've learnt from contemporary American horror films, it's that you can't trust foreigners, especially Eastern Europeans, who, at the first available opportunity, will sell you into slavery, harvest your organs, use you in bizarre scientific experiments, torture you for the amusement of others, or in the case of Paintball, trick you into becoming human targets in a ruthless manhunt. Still, with characters as dumb and obnoxious as those in this film, folk who willingly allow themselves to be hooded, shackled and driven to an unknown destination by complete strangers, I say have at it, Mr Johnny Foreigner—by all means slaughter these irritating, whiny, gung-ho morons for sport—you'll be doing the human race a favour!
The whole 'survival game for real' idea is hardly original (Nico Mastorakis did the same thing decades earlier with The Zero Boys, which was quickly followed by Masterblaster), but that doesn't mean it doesn't still have the potential to be hugely entertaining; sadly, Paintball blows it in almost every conceivable way, the cocky characters just begging for a bullet between the eyes only being the start of the problem. In addition to making the viewer not give a damn whether anyone lives or dies, the film suffers from lousy acting, a lack of decent action, and dreadful direction from Daniel Benmayor, who opts for a horrible wobbly cam technique and the use of POV for the killer, neither of which work particularly well: the frantic camera-work makes it hard to follow the action while the potentially gory POV kills are seen through some sort of high-tech thermal imaging goggles that display everything in monochrome and negative, meaning that the death scenes are frustratingly short of the red stuff (blood looks like milk!).
After much tedium, frantic running around the woods, and screaming, the final survivor (a woman, naturally) is inexplicably given assistance by the people controlling the hunt, and faces off against the killer in a derelict building where the script introduces a dumb 'deus ex machina'—a case inexplicably chained to a wall—that comes in very handy in defeating the enemy. As the winner of the game, the woman is allowed to walk free, but in a very confusing final scene, is seen being pursued down a railway track. Here's hoping she got flattened by a train!
The whole 'survival game for real' idea is hardly original (Nico Mastorakis did the same thing decades earlier with The Zero Boys, which was quickly followed by Masterblaster), but that doesn't mean it doesn't still have the potential to be hugely entertaining; sadly, Paintball blows it in almost every conceivable way, the cocky characters just begging for a bullet between the eyes only being the start of the problem. In addition to making the viewer not give a damn whether anyone lives or dies, the film suffers from lousy acting, a lack of decent action, and dreadful direction from Daniel Benmayor, who opts for a horrible wobbly cam technique and the use of POV for the killer, neither of which work particularly well: the frantic camera-work makes it hard to follow the action while the potentially gory POV kills are seen through some sort of high-tech thermal imaging goggles that display everything in monochrome and negative, meaning that the death scenes are frustratingly short of the red stuff (blood looks like milk!).
After much tedium, frantic running around the woods, and screaming, the final survivor (a woman, naturally) is inexplicably given assistance by the people controlling the hunt, and faces off against the killer in a derelict building where the script introduces a dumb 'deus ex machina'—a case inexplicably chained to a wall—that comes in very handy in defeating the enemy. As the winner of the game, the woman is allowed to walk free, but in a very confusing final scene, is seen being pursued down a railway track. Here's hoping she got flattened by a train!