The Barge People (2018)

Sisters Kat (Kate Davies-Speak) and Sophie (Natalie Martins) are going on a barging holiday on the British canals with their respective boyfriends, the eminently likeable Mark (Mark McKirdy) and the eminently punchable banker Ben (Matt Swales). There are some tensions between the men, what with Ben being a total twat, but things do seem to go well enough. That is, until Ben manages to provoke the – admittedly easily provokable – ire of some people actually living on the canals (among them British low budget horror regular Makenna Guyler).

The English barge-dwelling version of the more common US backwoods murder hick isn’t going to be the quartet’s main problem for long, for there is also a school of human-eating fish-person mutants to cope with.

Director (and often editor, producer and writer) Charlie Steeds has been making a pretty astonishing number of movies in the last half decade or so, wildly varying in tone and horror subgenre. Those I’ve seen by now are all very low budget but a far cry above quite a bit of your typical amateur or semi-professional genre movies. That’s mostly thanks to a mixture of actual filmmaking chops on the side of Steeds and his cohorts behind and before the camera and an impression of drive and energy that suggests these films to be made by people who’d make movies independently of how much money they can scratch together. There’s also an air of this being made by an actual troupe, with actors and off-camera talent recurring again and again in various films in different mixtures, the sort of thing otherwise only Mike Flanagan seem to still get away with on a higher budget level. This approach can – and does certainly do in the case of Steeds’s Dark Temple Motion Pictures – lead to films that feel just that decisive bit more personal, like actual labours of love.

The Barge People with its wild mix of elements of a good handful of exploitation and horror sub-genres certainly feels like such a labour of love, with a director who clearly hasn’t just seen a lot of genre movies but also learned why they use the tricks they use and how to apply these to his own work productively; a script – this time around not by Steeds but by Christopher Lombard – that uses and mixes genre tropes with verve and intelligence, and an acting ensemble that can actually act.

That last point is of course not always a given on this budget level, and also helps The Barge People to avoid my greatest bugbear with contemporary lowest budget/DIY horror – dialogue scenes that are slow like molasses, and start too early to then go on and on and on until they arrive nowhere, too late. Here, acting and dialogue are tight, get to the point the film wants to make with them, and then end when they should. Pacing is one of Steeds’s strengths in any case, so The Barge People not only zips along nicely for most of the time but also knows when it is actually useful for it to slow down. So there’s an actual rhythm to the film that’s not easy to reach on the cheap, when reshoots and unlimited time to get a scene just right are most certainly not on the table.

Also rather nice are the copious scenes of gore. Realized practically, the effects are just the right side of not being realistic, so that the gore elements are eminently fun. Admittedly, the fish mutant masks are less than perfect, but these guys are such natty dressers, I can’t say I find myself caring about this as a weakness one lick.

Finally, as someone who has historically gone on about the importance for low budget cinema of any kind to mix the filmmakers’ favourite genre tropes (let’s call it the genre universal) with elements of local specificity, I can’t help but love a film that does variations on backwoods horror on the English canal system. I’m not sure that Robert Aickman or L.T.C. Rolt would have approved of this particular usage, but I’m all too happy about it.