Director: Daniel Murphy, R.J. Cecott and Tom Komisar
Year: 2017
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Psycho Family
Plot:
Heading out into the wilderness, a group of friends hoping to document their search for a legendary local creature for a reality show find their trip interrupted by a clan of backwoods hunters who kidnap and hold them hostage forcing the group to band together to get away from the deranged locals.
Review:
This one ended up being quite the enjoyable effort. Among it's better qualities is the rather fine atmosphere this creates out in the woods for their show. The found-footage aspect gives this a great setup to engage in plenty of moody and atmospheric takes on the location with the way it handles the isolation and darkness which works rather nicely in providing plenty to like within here. There's some creepy ideas within the concept of the darkened woods and the sounds of inhuman growling appearing off in what seems like a few feet away, and as the night carries on there's plenty of chilling scenes as the group slowly realizes what's going on in the woods which gives way to a much darker reveal in the final half when it gets to the cause of what's going on. Those scenes in the shack contain quite a nice sense of terror with the whole group being held captive and tormented by the family with their antics being abbreviated yet still somewhat terrifying to get through which is all done through the found-footage aspect. As well, this one has some great stuff to enjoy with the scenes of the group being stalked in the woods, giving this some nice action with the way the creature begins hunting them down within the darkness of the woods and the chaos it causes as a result. As this one has some nice nudity thrown in as well, there's some rather enjoyable elements at play here as there were a few minor problems with it.
The main issue at hand here is the story makes no sense at all as to how the footage was compiled since there's no survivors of the whole experience and the footage ends up with the villains seeing as they're the last ones standing. That leaves this with a huge gaping hole as to what was available in order to compile the finished film, and with the filmed footage coming from multiple sources, that does have plenty of issues here in that actual setup of the found-footage aspect. The other big issue with the film is the fact that the main animal attacks here are obscured by that format with the shaking camera-work completely obscuring the action by keeping it out-of-focus in all the chaos featured throughout everyone going into every state possible trying to figure out what's going on. There's nothing possible about how to tell what's going on that comes about here and it tends to ruin the creepiness of being attacked by a strange creature as you can't see the action at all which does lower this one since the entire sequence is carried out in this manner and it's the big centerpiece sequence in the film on top of that. These here are the film's minor drawbacks.
Overview: ** 1/2/5
As there's a lot to like here for the most part, this one emerges as a solid and engaging effort in their catalog of films. As there's a few minor problems to be had that emerge as those of their other works, this is a worthwhile effort to dig into for fans of their other works.
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