Runaway From Retreat

1 star

Let’s talk about eyeballs.

But first, anyone fearing spoilers should be aware that the following review contains many: spoilers about eyeballs, blood and gore, cheeseball acting, bad writing, and the biggest spoiler of all for anyone planning to watch Corporate Retreat: it’s not very good.

Directed by Aaron Fisher (Inside the Rain), Corporate Retreat is the story of a group of rich, entitled brats going off for a weekend away from it all at a swanky desert chateau to celebrate the successful recent hostile takeover of their own tech company. Unbeknownst to them (but hardly surprising to the audience), the retreat has been arranged by Arthur (Alan Ruck), the company founder they ousted. Instead of trust falls, role-playing games, and other team-building exercises, Arthur has a special agenda for his former employees. 

He’s going to kill them.

Which brings us to the spoons. Well, at least eventually. Arthur’s plan is intertwined with his psychotic belief that by putting themselves through the tasks he has set up, his former employees will obtain ‘true enlightenment ‘. Or some such crap. The script, cowritten by Fisher and Kerri Lee Romeo, gives Arthur plenty to babble on about, and Ruck (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) delights in chewing the scenery as he spouts his lines. Unfortunately, instead of pulling us into Arthur’s mad worldview, it all comes across as a time-filler, something to pad the story out between gory killings. So it’s blah, blah, blah, cut somebody’s throat, then blah, blah, blah, shoot someone in the head, blah, blah, blah, cut somebody’s heart out and put it in a jar. 

Now here’s the spoiler.

Arthur’s plan is a seven-step program, with step six having the remaining retreaters open their third eye by removing one of their own good eyes themselves, without anesthetic or other medical attention. Just themselves and a spoon that Arthur passes along after removing his own eye with it. Now, as if sharing the bloody spoon wasn’t gross enough, Fisher and brother/cinematographer Josh Fisher spend the next 5 minutes or so (it feels much longer) giving the audience some extreme close-ups of people pulling their eyes out with a spoon. There’s lots of blood and viscera and lots of screaming and crying. For the viewer, there’s also a lot of confusion about why none of Arthur’s victims fight back. Sure, one refuses to pull her eye out and gets shot in the head, but there’s no reason the others can’t just rush him and get the hell out of there. They outnumber him 4 to 1. Yes, Arthur has armed bodyguards, Amber and Lola (Zión Moreno and Sasha Lane, to protect him, but neither of them looks too dangerous. They hold their guns like they were fashion accessories instead of deadly weapons. 

And what happens next? What happens when everybody except Amber and Lola is half blind and bleeding to death?

I have no idea. Final spoiler alert: I didn’t finish watching Corporate Retreat. No matter how badly I wanted to see Arthur slaughtered in as grisly a way as budget and filmmaking limitations allowed, I couldn’t see myself wasting any more time watching this one.