Caught in a crossfire between licence-payers and rival media groups, the BBC has reached the frankly surreal conclusion that the answer is to cut down on imported programmes. Luckily Harper's Island (BBC3) has snuck in under the wire.
A fiendishly slick 13-parter acquired from CBS in the States, Harper's whisks us off to the eponymous location (situated offshore from Seattle amid dreamily-shot Washington State scenery) where wedding guests are gathering for the nuptials of wealthy Trish Wellington and earthy regular guy Henry Dunn. Trish's dad (Richard Burgi from 24 and Desperate Housewives) emits a health-spa glow and looks like he owns Ralph Lauren, while Henry only has his wacky Uncle Marty (a raddled and whiskery Harry Hamlin) to lean on.
Any expectations of convivial party-going are disembowelled even before the guests reach the island. Beneath the boat about to ferry them across, an unknown man wearing scuba equipment is trussed helplessly. As the engines rev and the propellers churn, the victim is seen screaming silently before the water turns a foaming red. The party-goers are enjoying too much uproarious jollity to notice, but the thud and splat of tumbling corpses is going to haunt the ensuing days as the wedding deadline nears. The fact that Harper's Island is the former playground of deceased serial killer John Wakefield, who killed six people there seven years earlier, is flagged up tirelessly. So was he not really dead? Has he made a supernatural comeback? Did he have a long-lost twin brother?
Curmudgeonly critics have carped that Harper's Island shamelessly recycles a phone book full of horror cliches, notably the indestructible slasher franchise of Friday the 13th, but these are the kind of people who'd complain that CSI: Miami has too many shots of Miami in it. Harper's revels in its ripped-off shocker riffs, and you can hear the production team cackling insanely as they pile on the cheap thrills and toy with the viewer's fight-or-flight reflex. A girl goes looking for her lost dog and ends up in a pit, immolated in blazing gasoline. Uncle Marty falls through the planking of a wooden bridge, and is hacked in half by an unseen assailant. The local priest is hung up by his feet and terminated by a flashing axe-blade. Bubbling through the mix are some premonitory shudders from The Shining, the being-hunted-by-unseen-killers nightmare of Southern Comfort, some disorientating weirdness from Lost and a squeeze of Blair Witch Project.
The crafty part is the way writer Ari Schlossberg and director Jon Turteltaub have routed all this through the comforting formulae of prime-time normalcy, as if the earnest adolescent melodrama of Dawson's Creek had slipped out of the back door and gone hog-wild on steroids and crack cocaine. Why is Trish's dad plotting with her ex-lover against her fiance? Who dragged the bloody deer's head into the bathtub? Who hanged Kelly, right after she had sex with fellow tattoo fetishist JD? Why is the feline Chloe going out with a gormless English wimp called Cal? And above all, if the bloodletting continues at this pace, how will there be any characters left standing by episode five?
Harper's Island continues Sunday September 13 on BBC3 at 9pm
