The Domestics  ★★½

HORROR film The Domestics borrows so much from other influences that it fails to make a lasting impression of its own.

Clockwork Orange, The Warriors, Escape From New York, The Purge, every Mad Max film ever made…you name a post-apocalyptic action thriller and there’s a reference.

That doesn’t necessarily make The Domestics a bad film, just an unoriginal exercise that constantly reminds you of better films.

It’s also marred by a dire performance from Kate Bosworth who goes from weak and vulerbale to strong and threatening in the blink of an eye.

The film stars well by keeping the exposition to a minimum and throwing the audience into the action.

Most of the country has been devastated by a poison used by the governemnt as a form of extreme population control.

What the government’s ultimatelt was is never clear, but it’s largely irrelevant anyway because the resulting bsocietal breakdown is what the film is more interested in.

Honest, law-abiding survivors are restricted to their home barricades while murderous gangs rule the streets.

Those home-bound are known as Domestics while the warriung gangs include the Nail Boys; the Plough Boys, who drive snow ploughs; the Sex Traffickers; the Gamblers, who spin a wheel to decide who they will kill; and the Sheets who, well they wear sheets.

More interesting are the lone-wolf killers who also pop in and out of the story, despite their motivations never being fully presented or explored.

Mark and Nina West, a couple struggling in their marriage, are Domestics who have lost contact with Nina’s parents in another State. They decide to brave the outside and travel 192 miles to Milwaukee to find them.

This leads of course to a regular series of violent encounters that get bloodier and gorier as the film progresses.

There is a nice twist on a Russian Roulette sequence, brobably the best moments in the film, and some tension in sudden explosions of violence, but overall writer/director Mike Preston struggles to present anything new.

A scene with Nina dancing around to a heavy metal song while swigging from a bottle is one of the worst memoments I’ve seen on film this year.

The film is supposed to present an ironic approach to America’s gun culture but isn’t done well enough to pull this off.

In the end it looks more like a celebration rather than denegration of gun use and violence as a method of dealing with any problem.