The pace picks up early on and never lets up in director/co-writer Alastair Orr’s high octane horror-thriller, Triggered (2020). This movie can be summarized as being similar to Battle Royale (2000) in style and sentiment, and then further mixed with Lord of the Flies and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) in premise, except the unfortunate victim-youths in this movie are young millennials. Distributed by Octane Entertainment, Triggered will be released to US audiences via on-demand and digital on November 6th.

After an old friend invites his eight closest high school friends on a camping trip, the group rekindles old bonds, and old grudges, during a night of partying in the deep woods. They awake to find that suicide vests have been strapped to each one of them that display varying countdowns, and after an all too brief explanation from the culprit, the group soon finds that in order to stay alive, they must kill each other in order to win the remaining time of whoever they murder. Miles into thick woods and unable to remove the vests, the friends race to solve why they are victims and how else to escape the contraptions, but as the players’ countdowns dwindle closer to their time of death, rationale is tossed to the darkness and the killing games begin.

I enjoyed most everything about Triggered, it is fun, it is high action, it has smart social commentary, and even sometimes witty dialogue. There is nothing quite as eerie as the deep dark woods, but Triggered makes the woods more dangerous than spooky. With the intense moonlight from above and the faint glow off of the players’ digital vests, the movie turned out to be pretty exciting, visually, despite the sometimes hard to see through, shadowy darkness of a tree-crowded forest. The dialogue in the film is great, story/co-writer David D. Jones and Alastair Orr created believable banter topped off with horror film references and snarky one-liners — I honestly laughed out loud quite a few times, though I would not peg this film as a comedy.

At first, I had feared I would not care about any characters with the movie starting out with nine friends — although there were quite a lot of characters, no one got lost in the mix and the movie revealed everyone’s background and personality little by little, keeping the audience on their feet and the movie interesting. There are clever twists stuck into the storyline here and there as well, and even until the last frame, one can expect the unexpected out of these characters. Each death is definitely bloody, but there might have been a missed opportunity to make memorable kill shots — there were quite a lot of explosions, stabbings, and hacking going on, but they were surprisingly straightforward, with a seemingly ‘on to the next slaying’ attitude.

Though Triggered is nothing to write home about premise-wise, it successfully subverts expectations enough times to feel fresh, and though it offers some social commentary, it thankfully does not feel like a complete millennial bashing session. Though apparently Triggered is a South African production, it sure feels like a pretty good American version of Battle Royale, in-line with another recent kill-or-be-killed horror flick The Hunt (2020), that I was also pleasantly surprised with. Though Triggered seems forgettable due to the lack of impactful visuals, it is at least a very fun film while it lasts during its 90-minute runtime.

7 out of 10