I caught (that verb seems appropriate) director Xavier Gens’ new film The Divide as a midnight screener at the Ritz theatre. By far the best thing I can say about the experience is that the volunteers running the show just let us in instead of making us wait in line and thus subjecting us to the depraved drunken antics of 6th Street on St. Patrick’s Day.

Of the two dozen films I saw at SXSW, this is easily the worst (beating out even the agonizing ponderousness of Silver Bullets—that at least had some laughs and exhibitionistic women). It starts out impressively enough, with a cold open that throws you straight into the onset of a nuclear apocalypse, with big, loud explosions, screaming viscera, panicking droves, and the like before slapping you in the face with the title screen.

But after that it settles in to devolving into a bargain-basement “people stuck in a shelter” psychological thriller, which is to say populated by the usual clichés—the crazy veteran (Michael Biehn), the flighty mother (Roseanna Arquette), the coward (Ivan Gonzalez), the budding psycho (Milo Ventimiglia)—and a host of others whose sole purpose is to scream and make stupid decisions—and yes, there’s a screamy child, too.

And oh, what stupid decisions they make: failing to attack the psycho when they have the chance; attacking the wrong guy when they do work up the “nerve”; neutralizing the only person who displays any sort of competence; killing the black guy first, and all other head-slapping tropes you can imagine. My father once criticized The Dark Knight because he reasoned that someone just should’ve shot the Joker.

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