Hybrid   Starring: Shannon Beckner, Oded Fehr and Ryan Kennedy G2 Pictures RRP: £15.99 G2P038 Certificate: 15 Available 13 February 2012

A car with blacked-out windows is involved in a serious crash at a crossroads, but when help arrives there is no one inside. It is towed to a multi-level garage and parked on a lower floor. However, when someone arrives to move it the car has somehow repaired itself. The workers at the garage find themselves trapped below ground with a killer car with a life of its own. There is some kind of hideous shape-changing creature beneath the bonnet which can morph itself into any shape. If they are to make it out alive the garage employees will need to work together. The garage owner is an ex-soldier, but it’s a young woman who rallies the troops...

The natural place to begin here is by naming those films which have been stolen from... I mean inspired the making of this one. The classic films Duel, written by master storyteller Richard Matheson and directed by Steven Spielberg, and John Carpenter’s Christine, based on the Stephen King novel. There are other examples, among them the awful Black Cadillac, the video release of which I reviewed way back in the mists of time. The central problem with this film is that it lacks character (and characterisation, come to that). It isn’t chilling, or edgy, or quirky, or even interesting. It isn’t really anything aside from an 81 minute runaround. Let’s remember that a car is a fairly large object - much larger than an individual person, and much less flexible. So why do these scared people run across open spaces?

The creature reveal almost certainly blew the majority of what little budget there was for this escapade. Unfortunately it also blew apart the shaky structure of logic which beggars the question if the creature can metamorphose into any shape why did it stick with the car? Also, one of the characters calls it a hybrid; what evidence is there for that assumption, as no one has seen anything like it before. And as for the twist at the conclusion... Well, the least said about that the better.

This film rarely revs above idle, so I would advise any prospective purchaser to Dodge this one and pick up the aforementioned Duel and Christine instead.

3

Ty Power