I grew up with the stories of the Beast Of Exmoor. I was born in North Devon and went to school on the edge of Exmoor. When I was tiny and the rumours went into overdrive, the army was even called in a few miles from where I lived to look for the big cat that was said to be attacking livestock and at the time was causing a media sensation.
As a result I was very interested to see Xmoor, even if despite its name it wasn’t filmed in the southwest of England, instead heading for Northern Ireland.
Matt (Nick Blood) and Georgia (Melia Kreiling) are an American couple who head to Devon hoping to catch the legendary Beast Of Exmoor on film, which comes with a £25,000 reward. Georgia has contacted a tracker, Fox (Mark Bonnar), who she thinks can help them find the animal. Arriving at the isolated farmhouse where they’re meeting Fox, it quickly becomes apparent that something is amiss.
Things get even stranger when they head out looking for the creature, but instead of coming across an oversized cat they find what appears to be the dumping ground of a serial killer.
Xmoor is a bit of a curious beast, if you’ll excuse the pun. Those who know the legends are likely to be expecting a movie about a killer big cat, but that quickly starts to feel like a ruse as the film isn’t that at all.
Instead it’s something a little more human, which does have a couple of new ideas but largely just messes around with well-worn tropes. There are sections that are a lot of fun and pretty tense, but there’s also a lot that more than a little silly, replete with people giving long explanations about why they should do things that every other person on the planet would know is immensely dumb.
It’s also more than happy to play into the beloved horror stereotype that all rural people are complete nutjobs, although maybe I’m just more prone to bristle at that with Xmoor due to the fact that with this film it’s my Westcountry brethren they’re suggesting are all potential rapists, thugs, drug addicts and murderers. Obviously in the world of the movies, the treatment of Americans in the South West of England is still stuck in the same place it was in 1971’s Straw Dogs.
After a while though it becomes clear though that this is almost the point of the movie blending genre ideas while twisting away and towards the expected. This is a film that knows about Straw Dogs and the many other rural weirdo movies. It’s also well aware of other horror tropes, from monster movies to serial killer flicks, even throwing the edge of a ghost story in at one point, and there’s no doubt that it wants to play with them. That’s also true of its visual style, which chucks in shaky-cam, point of view shots, creeping around in the dark and multi-camera found footage type sections to try and cross the horror boundaries.
It’s an interesting idea but ultimately it’s not entirely sure what to do with all these things, and despite its subgenre hopping, it become pretty standard stuff once its settles down into running-around-in-the dark-from-a-nutcase mode. Indeed, there are a couple of moments towards the end that almost come across horror parody considering all the genre bending it’s attempted before.
Xmoor isn’t terrible and it works in terms of passing the time if you’re looking for a bit of horror, but with all the playing with genre that it does not least its initial attempts to set up a monster movie before heading somewhere else it ends up being surprisingly standard horror.
It’s almost a shame they didn’t just make a Beast Of Exmoor movie, as that might have ended up being even more fun.
Overall Verdict: A genre-bending horror film that ends up showing off its film knowledge but not really taking it anywhere new, resulting in a movie that’s sometimes fun and rather creepy but which never rises much beyond pretty standard horror fare.
Reviewer: Tim Isaac