In short: Shopping Tour (2012)

Original title: Shopin-tur

A month or so after the death of the family father, a mother (Tatyana Kolganova) – let’s call her Mom – and her son Stas (Timofey Yeletskiy, I assume) participate in a bus shopping tour from their native Russia to strange, exotic Finland, where people are much friendlier, laid back and civilized. Mom also gifts Stas a brand-new camera phone with what appears to be a magical battery, and we all know what that means: the footage we are about to see is of course shot on it.

There’s a bit of time for Mom and Stas to bicker and argue (and not just about the fact that Stas didn’t know they were going on a shopping tour instead of a real bus tour to Finland) but soon, they have more serious troubles to cope with: turns out the bus operation screwed up and brought its busload of shoppers to Finland on the one day in the year when everybody there turns into a foreigner-eating cannibal. Oops.

When it comes to ultra low budget POV horror movies about Finnish cannibals, Mikhail Brashinskiy’s Shopping Tour is certainly the cream of the crop. It might be the only entry in this rather specific little sub-sub-genre, but that’s neither here nor there.

Even if you take a slightly broader view of it, the film’s still a cheap and fun little thing, often staging its shots rather cleverly, moving at just the right pace, and including interesting facts about Finland. There is, obviously, not terribly much depth to the whole affair but there’s such a nice flow to the film, and none of the annoyances that mar quite a few POV horror films it’s really worth watching, particularly if you partake of a more sardonic sense of humour. And really, didn’t we all suspect there’s something unhealthy about shopping tours?