MAYHEM

Open-plan office or cubicle hell: Who has never considered, in the course of their nine-to-five job, taking Horst from accounting and beating his head to a pulp or pushing Laura from marketing out the window? Joe Lynch’s low-down, satirically padded Midnight Movie MAYHEM plays through exactly those daydreams to an extreme. A virus ex machina transforms well-behaved desk-victims into uninhibited maniacs. In the midst of this is Derek, who is just about to explain to the management how a colleague tricked him. But the pathogen-induced explosions of violence of his formerly gray-in-gray fellow office workers suddenly turn the way to the upper floor into a real-life beat-’em-up. Around every corner, down every hallway, knife-wielding lunatics are lurking; department supervisors suddenly call themselves “The Reaper,” “The Siren,” or “The Bull,” and they usually hold the key-cards in their hands, with which Derek can reach the next floor up. Dismissing MAYHEM as only a bloody meat platter would be a mistake, though. Although the director Joe Lynch readily admits the great pleasure he gets from breaking bodies in the most creative ways, his splatstick comedy is also a garish and cryptic wish-fulfillment fantasy for harried office workers.