With a premise that might as well be an interwoven riff on Funny Games, Deliverance and I Spit on Your Grave, director Levan Bakhia’s Landmine Goes Click is probably the most disturbing thing I’ve watched since the notorious A Serbian Film. The story starts innocently enough, with a guy leaving his fiance and best friend standing on a live landmine in the middle of the European Georgian wilderness. That’s the innocent part—leaving your friend and future wife to get blown to smithereens over an infidelity.

What devolves next is not for the faint of heart. Actually, I’m not sure who it’s for, or if I should even be recommending it on this blog. Which is why I bring up Funny Games, a movie I loathed watching but one that does pose the important question of why our society gets off on cinematic sadism. Or as Jamie Dornan put it in one of The Fall’s more memorable lines (before the series took a horse tranquilizer in Season 3), “Why the fuck are you watching this? You sick shit. What the fuck is wrong with you?”



Indeed, that question begs answering in Landmine. One could argue that once this backwoods horror-show of rape, murder and torturous brutality comes to a close, there is a smidgen of moral resolution. But that might be a stretch.

All disclaimers aside, Landmine Goes Click is an expertly paced horror thriller that’s as evocative in its “revenge porn” as some of the most twisted major cinema to come out of the ’70s (I Spit on Your Grave, The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes). And it’s hard not to admire the all-out psychologically warped performances of Sterling Knight and Kote Tolordava as a Yank and Georgian in a cat-and-mouse game of mortal combat.



As in Funny Games, some of Bakhia’s scenes do linger to a point of near-unwatchable unease. So don’t say I didn’t warn you. But if you can handle A Serbian Film, you won’t have any problems getting through this. You didn’t come to this website to read about Twilight, right?

GRADE: B / B+

IMDb: 6.2

-Sam Adams