Travellers; Brotherhood – review

Both of these promising, low-budget melodramas, one British, the other American, are set over a period of a few hours and start with pranks that lead to lethal consequences. In Travellers , a socially mixed quartet of thirtysomething London bikers sets off for an adventurous weekend in the country. One of their number, a racist ex-soldier, sprays the words "pikey scum" on a caravan they see in a field, and they find themselves running for their lives from a party of Irish travellers. It's close in aspiration, though not in achievement, to the Walter Hill classic Southern Comfort , and reminiscent of Deliverance , to which an admiring nod is made by giving John Boorman's son Charley a walk-on role. Fifty six years ago, Alfred McClung Lee wrote a devastating attack on the exclusive and excluding fraternities in American universities with the resonant title Fraternities Without Brotherhood . In the 1970s, it seemed they were on the wane, but Animal House helped make them fashionable once more. Will Canon's brisk thriller Brotherhood shows how a misconceived initiation ceremony leads to violence and mayhem one night at a Texas college and, along the way, it exposes the snobbery, racism and macho idiocy encouraged by fraternities.