Genre: Slasher Dark/Comedy
Premise: A group of job applicants arrive at a sleek highrise for a coveted position, but find themselves trapped and fighting for their lives against a psychopathic assessor known as Cutthroat, who wields a briefcase full of nasty weapons and is out to kill all of them.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me movie ideas. I accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. Ever since, I’ve been reviewing them on the site, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, got him a manager and possibly more.
Writer: Dean Books (DeanB)
Details: 88 pages
Can today’s Blood & Ink script break the current streak and earn a “worth the read?” Let’s find out!
23 year old Nelson Krell has just found out that his girlfriend is banging his way-too-old overweight uncle. Which makes getting the job today even more important. He needs to get out of this dependent life and become an actual adult!
Nelson shows up at a headhunter’s office in a tall skyscraper downtown. While waiting, he meets douchebag Jeremy, who lets everyone immediately know that he went to an Ivy League school. They’re soon joined by a small nervous girl with colored hair who Jeremy dubs, “Pronouns.”
Girlboss Margi, who is the most competitive person on the planet, arrives next. And then there’s Jayden, a black Greek God. “Oh, we’re screwed now,” Jeremey says, letting Nelson know that DEI just lost them this job. Not long after, looksmaxxing Asian, Josh, shows up.
They are all brought into a conference room and that’s where they meet Cutthroat, this giant pale faced dude with blood tears streaking gown his face adding an extra dose of “uncanny” to his uncanny valley-like face. The dude looks terrifying before he’s even said a word.
“Here’s how it works,” he says. “We’re going to spend the day together in a lovely group interview. I’ll be gauging your skills, weighing your competence. Determining whether you are fit to join the vast capitalist machine. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto employment except through me. Nod your heads if you understand.”
When Jeremey calls this weird recruiting setup bullshit, Cutthroat calmly takes a hatchet out of his desk and hurls it at Jeremy’s face. Jeremy dead. And that’s when everyone else RUNS. But what they don’t realize is that Cutthroat has modified all his floors in this building to be a killing ground. No matter where they turn, gruesome deaths await.
The worst fate goes to Josh, who is so hungry for the one candy bar left in a vending machine that he sticks his hands up there to get it and the vending machine turns into this whirling wood chipper device, pulling his entire body inside where he’s soon turned into human goo.
Eventually, the only candidates left are Nelson and Pronouns, who figure out that this guy has gone insane and that, maybe, if they can pretend like they’re actual employees who are here to do work, he just might buy it. And Cutthroat does! At least for a while. You see, what neither Cutthroat or the applicants know is that this is a CIA program gone bad. And the CIA is sending in their clean-up guy to take care of Cutthroat AND the applicants…
Even though this script isn’t quite my thing, I have a feeling it’s going to end up being one of the best Blood & Ink scripts when this is all over.
A good script usually starts with a writer who has a strong vision of what they want to do, and then they go out and execute that vision. Dean knew EXACTLY what script he wanted to write. And then he wrote it.
To clarify what I mean, when I read Volunteers, I got the sense that the writer was still trying to figure out the story and the tone while they were writing it. And you can feel that as a reader. There’s a tentativeness to the storytelling. The script keeps trying things instead of confidently telling you, “This is the movie.” That lack of conviction can kill a screenplay.
Meeting a screenplay for the first time isn’t that different from meeting a person for the first time. If somebody can’t look you in the eye, doesn’t speak with conviction, is dressed sloppily, you immediately sense that lack of confidence.
Screenplays give off the same signals. The choices feel tentative. The tone shifts around. The writer seems to be asking you if something works instead of telling you that it does.
That’s what I mean when I say a script hasn’t figured out who it is yet. Dean’s script knows exactly who it is. You may not like that person. You may not want to spend two hours with that person. But there’s never a second where you wonder who walked in the room.
Probably my favorite moment in the script was when Nelson and Pronouns realized they needed to outsmart this guy and so they started pretending they were office workers putting deals together to the classic music of “9 to 5.” I could totally envision that montage up on the big screen.
To me, that’s when the script was at its best.
I also liked that Dean kept reminding us who his characters were again and again so that we knew them. I read so many screenplays where writers are very mushy about their characters. They either have zero defining traits or 10 defining traits. Strong characters have that one overarching trait that defines them that the writer keeps hitting on again and again.
Like Margie here. Margie could’ve easily been a forgettable character. She actually gets cut off from the main group several times, leaving her absent for a large portion of the story. But Margie is this crazy ultra-competitive woman who will stop at nothing until she wins and so even though she’s not in the script that much, we know exactly who she is. Cause she never backs down and is always trying to win. A highlight of the script is her chainsaw battle with Cutthroat.
Now, a problem that these specific “high concept” scripts run into is that they run out of steam. And the best way to combat that is a midpoint reversal or escalation or twist. Something that gives the script a second life.
Dean gives us that when we cut to the CIA and hear them acknowledging that this Cutthroat Project has gone haywire. This guy was built to be the ultimate decider of who could handle the tough jobs. But he went crazy and turned his business into a killing ground. So, now, the CIA has to take him out by sending in their ultimate fixer, The Benediction.
The reason this adds an extra life to the story is because we’ve just been told that the terrifying guy who’s been trying to turn us into people soup for the last 3 hours isn’t even the scariest guy we’re going to deal with today! There’s a new guy coming in who’s even worse! I love that.
However, this is the one major creative choice in Cutthroat I didn’t agree with. Making “The Benediction” a Cutthroat clone was weak sauce (or Cutthroat was his clone). You promised us something different and scarier yet you gave us the exact same thing.
The Benediction needs to be a completely new scary “fixer” character in a different way. And I think you can have all sorts of fun building this character. Who can possibly be scarier than Cutthroat? It’s been done before. Who could possibly be scarier than Darth Vader? They made The Emperor. So, let’s reimagine this character.
This script still has some growing to do but I think it’s worth the read.
Script link: Cutthroat
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I actually think that most writers under-describe their key characters. Everybody is going by this advice that you have to keep your script moving and therefore you have to describe your characters quickly. That’s true for secondary characters but I think that a deep description, even though it slows the script down in the moment, pays major dividends on the back end for main characters. And this is the perfect example. Cutthroat could’ve easily been described as, “A strange looking man with a plastic complexion.” But check out the description written by Dean. It’s very specific and it allowed me to clearly see who the villain in this movie was: “CUTTHROAT. A handsome monolith with wide shoulders in a dark blue suit with a polka dot handkerchief in the pocket. A plastic complexion. Always smiling. “Uncanny valley” effect. Racially ambiguous. Age-30-55? Perfectly combed blonde (dyed) hair, vivid blue (contact lensed) eyes. A bizarre twitchy Frankenstein of the quintessential corporate overlord.”
