"I've always loved that classic noir staple — of doomed characters trying to get away with a crime and just digging themselves further into a hole," remarks author Simon Lewis in the United Kingdom's net fan site, Crime Time (crimetime.co.uk).
In "Border Run," a remote Asian locale serves as the venue for a gut-wrenching experience that bares the rawest side of the human psyche. Two adventure-seeking British backpackers in southeastern China, Jake and Will, arrange to be driven to a scenic waterfall across the border in Myanmar. When they arrive, two cute native women are waiting for them by the waterfall, and we soon see the two young Brits have diametrically different ideas about paying for sex.
This initial schism brings out the characters' embedded flaws: obstinacy, paranoia and cunning. The two find their Western driver-guide, Howard, is using their "tour" as cover to smuggle stimulant drugs into China — an offense punishable by death. What if they are intercepted at the border? Will confronts the guide but Jake has sampled the drug and in his frenzied, paranoid state uses a crossbow — shades of James Dickey's 1970 novel "Deliverance" — to shoot a border policeman who approaches them on the road, and suddenly their harmless excursion is transformed into a desperate exercise in covering up the murder of a cop.