Severance: Torn curtain

Friday marks a dark day for the tourism boards of Eastern Europe. Movie theaters nationwide will show the torture of college students vacationing in Slovakia in Eli Roth's horror flick Hostel II. Meanwhile, Atlanta sees the local release of Christopher Smith's grisly English film Severance, in which Western corporate drones suffer a high mortality rate at a sinister lodge near the borders of Hungary, Romania and Serbia.

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The end of the Cold War may have pulled back the Iron Curtain, but the Western media still portray the former Soviet Union as being shrouded in moral shadows. "Russian mobsters" may be the "safest," least offensive villains in current movies, while Borat found humor in the region's reputation for predatory lawlessness. Maybe that part of the world instilled such dread during the Cold War that it's now easily portrayed as the habitation of bogeymen, even though most of the citizens would never carve up Westerners with hunting knives.

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In Severance's ill-fated Balkan vacation, Smith cunningly employs and inverts the rules of slasher flicks. Severance lacks the bravura invention of a groundbreaking, throat-slashing film such as Scream, but with its witty screenplay and political shrewdness finds laughs and screams in equal measure.

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After a lurid, flash-forward prologue, we meet a handful of employees of Palisades Defense, a transnational arms corporation hosting a "team-building" weekend for the workers in its Eastern European territory. In addition to Maggie (Laura Harris), a sensible American, they're mostly Brits who follow familiar workplace archetypes, including a self-important, deluded boss (Tim McInnerny), an overly enthusiastic nerd (Andy Nyman) and an outspoken voice of political correctness (Claudie Blakley). Watching corporate video, Palisades' American CEO declares "We'll win the War on Terror," and the jerky salesman (Toby Stephens) sneers, "I bloody hope not."

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When a fallen tree blocks the road and the local bus driver flatly refuses to take a detour through the sinister woods, Severance begins to feel like a modern-day Brothers Grimm tale, only featuring the cast of "The Office." Hedonistic slacker Steve (Danny Dyer) claims to be seeing things, but since he's tripping on magic mushrooms, the others dismiss his warnings. When they stumble upon their destination, a deserted, middle-of-nowhere fleabag, it scarcely seems like a sanctuary. At the dinner table, they swap scary stories about the building's mysterious origins, each recounted in different cinematic styles, including Nosferatu-esque silent movie and porn flick.

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Despite grisly evidence that his group is being stalked, the boss insists they continue with the team-building exercises, and there's palpable irony as the group engages in bogus tests of character before they face an actual survival ordeal. A petty squabble over the rules of paintball turns into a life-or-death challenge following a shocking mishap with a bear trap. For performing in a film that features so much stage blood and stray body parts, the cast proves highly accomplished, shifting from comedic characterizations to horror-film desperation without a bump.

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Severance finds some clever shadings of its pointed theme – that representatives of arms dealers (and otherwise sheltered arms-dealing nations) reap what they've sown when they look down the barrels of the company's merchandise. At times Smith telegraphs the satire too heavily, with at least one Dr. Strangelove reference and, near the end, a bit of broad America-bashing, complete with Sousa music, that's bizarrely out of place, like something from a Hot Shots! film.

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Smith and co-writer James Moran assume their viewers are versed in horror films and tweak the genre's conventions, making heroes of unlikely characters and reversing the notion that "I'll be right back" signals someone's impending doom. In one of the earliest scenes, two busty blondes run through the woods, fall into a pit and strip to their underwear to make a rope and escape. Severance jokes at its own gratuitousness.

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Such knowing humor can undermine Severance's serious theme. It's willing to eviscerate Western nations and corporations in the abstract, but winks at the pop-culture savvy of horror fans who probably live and vote in those countries. For a film that never hesitates to prey on our fears of dental chairs, butcher's tools and flamethrowers, Severance seems a little scared of indicting its own audience.