CUB is a horror adventure in which a young imaginative twelve-year-old boy named Sam heads off to camp with his Cub Scouts pack, leaders Peter and Chris and quartermaster Yasmin. Once they enter the woods, Sam quickly feels something is not quite right. He soon stumbles upon a mysterious tree house and meets a shifty, masked feral-looking child. When Sam tries to warn his leaders, they ignore him: the boy often tells tall tales and Sam’s mysterious past which he refuses to talk about makes his leader Peter mistrust him. As Sam gets more and more isolated from the other scouts, he becomes convinced a terrible fate awaits them: the Feral Child, it turns out, is the helper of the Poacher, an evil psychopath, who has riddled the forest with ingenious traps and is intent on slaughtering the scouts… one by one…
This backwoods camping adventure and folk-legend fusion flies off the rails, unleashing a grotesque and vile nature in every character. "Cub" will leave you wanting to pack up your things and head home early.
The build-up is entertainingly eccentric, and there's some ingenious booby-trappery at work among the pines, but Cub runs dry once it knuckles down to the routine bloodletting.
Cub is characterised by terrific performances (especially from the pre-teen cast), playfully ghoulish bloodwork, and the most inventive instruments of death we've seen since the Saw franchise ran out of ideas.
Referencing everything from 'Suspiria' to 'The Cabin in the Woods', this is a horror movie made by and for genre fans - but that's not necessarily a good thing.
