For all its effective use of modern drone cinematography, this survival horror is very much a throwback to the video nasties of the 1980s. The villains are essentially cartoons: a heavily accented human trafficker (Sean Cronin) who comes complete with facial scar, cigar and goons. These are a big lad with stringy hair and an eye patch (Glenn Salvage), an even bigger lad with some painful-looking skin problems (Jon-Paul Gates), a dude who looks like he’s auditioning to play bass for Metallica (Mark Haldor), and a “pretty boy”, Jude (Louis James). Jude, a reasonably normal-looking guy, acts as a front for their outfit, a gang whose objective is to obtain 10 thin, blond women to be packed into a storage container and shipped to a wealthy client who remains faceless – we know him only from his voice and cufflinks.
The heroines are the kidnapped women: nurse Karla (Sarah Alexandra Marks), abuse survivor Lucy (Sophie Rankin), plus various smaller roles. The film sets its stall out in a tense opening four minutes, in which we open on a blond woman (Ksenia Islamova) in a pink string bikini and Pamela-Anderson-circa-1995 bleached denim cutoffs, sprinting breathily through the desert, pursued by a guy who looks as if he has been chucked out of the WWE for plagiarising The Undertaker’s shtick.
Naturally, Escape wouldn’t want to be accused of sexism, so there is plenty of proud feminism to be found, including (per the best traditions of rape revenge horrors like I Spit on Your Grave) a castration. There are no rape scenes and (perhaps surprisingly, given the otherwise lascivious camerawork) there’s no female nudity – just plenty of bikinis and lingering shots of the women being bound, gagged and dragged away by the aforementioned crew of meatheads.
Still, the most surprising thing about the whole rather sleazy endeavour is the numerous cutaway scenes to a command centre, where some of the wealthy parents of the missing women have assembled a crack squad of experts to … not actually do very much. These episodes feel much more low-budget than the human trafficking stuff (which is not exactly prestige cinema, but has a certain conviction to it) – more like a local theatre group’s recreation of scenes from The Bill during a party in someone’s kitchen.
• Escape is on digital platforms from 30 September.
