Severance, from British director Christopher Smith, is the latest entry into the burgeoning comedy horror genre. The genre's enjoyed a renaissance of sorts in recent years, largely thanks to the films of Smith's fellow countrymen Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, the duo responsible for instant classics Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

Severance follows the employees of fictional Anglo-American defense firm Palisades Defence as they travel to the mountains of Eastern Europe for a weekend of corporate team-building activities. Trouble strikes early for the motley crew of cubicle dwellers when their bus driver suddenly flees in a panic, leaving them stranded in the middle of a dense forest with scant supplies and an incomprehensible map. They wander around for a while (always a wise decision), eventually stumbling upon an abandoned lodge they mistakenly believe to be their team-building headquarters.

Once there, the contentious group spends too much time bickering amongst themselves to notice that they've been targeted by a group of deranged killers bent on ensuring that none of them escape alive. Turns out Palisades had some shady dealings involving chemical weapons there a few decades prior, rendering some of its inhabitants brain-damaged as a result. (Think of them as the Eastern European equivalent of the stereotypical Appalachian yokels we all know and love.) Needless to say, they’ve got some plans for the unsuspecting Palisades employees.

It's a delicate task, mixing comedy and horror. Messing up the tone just a tad can turn an uproariously funny scene into an uncomfortable, potentially disturbing experience. It takes a supremely skilled filmmaker to find humor in macabre subjects like torture and decapitation without alienating most of the audience.

At first, the tone of Severance is spot-on, living up to film's billing as a slasher-flick version of The Office. But as the bodycount mounts and the killings become more and more gruesome, the balance becomes irreparably tilted toward horror. Suddenly, seeing likeable characters getting tortured and killed isn't all that enjoyable, even if some of them do deserve it.

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