PANIC BUTTOn - ***

Directed by Chris Crow. Starring Scarlett Alice Johnson, Jack Gordon, Michael Jibson. Horror/Thriller, UK, 92 mins, cert 18.

Released in the UK by Showbox on Blu-ray and DVD. RRP £12.99. Out on 7th of November 2011.

What is a panic button anyway? It's never raised in the movie (except for one solitary mention in one garbled bit of shouting towards the end) and there isn't actually a physical button to be seen, panic or otherwise. Googling the phrase indicates that it's a social network thing that children and teenagers can use to report inappropriate behaviour, but it's scarcely applicable in the case of the film of the same name as all the inappropriate online behaviour is down to the potential victims: the revolting videos they've watched, the stupid lies they've told, the cyberbullying they've callously and thoughtlessly dished out from the safety of their laptops. It's a cautionary tale about exactly what you say and do online, that just might make you think about exactly what you do online, what you watch and who's watching you.

PANIC BUTTON has four young people winning a luxury flight to New York competition on the social networking site All2gethr which, at least for the lawyers, is absolutely not Facebook or anything like it, not even a tiny little bit, look, it's even got a completely different name to go along with Friend Lists and Like This and online chats and everything, it's obviously completely different and it's even a different colour. Anyway, after establishing the two girls as pretty but thick as pigswill and the two blokes as sub-Neanderthal yobs with the personality of a punch in the face, they suddenly have to play games on the flight which reveal precisely what they've been doing online. And if they refuse to play these increasingly sinister games, one of their online friends will be randomly selected and executed....

Despite basically being SAW in an aeroplane, this is actually a reasonably entertaining if nonsensical thriller if you can get past the thoroughly unpleasant characters and find it in yourself to actually root for any of them. One confined set, a small number of speaking parts and almost nothing in the way of special effects; the villain is a voiceover for almost the entire running time (represented on the video screens by a cartoon alligator), so it's not an expensive film although it looks terrific. Once the true nature of the flight is revealed and the villain's awful rationale it gets into the usual shouting and stabbing and sobbing, and racks up a reasonable degree of tension and is generally quite effective. It's not brilliant (how does the villain know how the realities of the four idiots differ from their online characters?) but it is rather good fun as a popcorn thriller; not as good as RED EYE but far better than ALTITUDE. Made in Cardiff.

Richard Street.

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