Director: David Ryan Keith
Year: 2020
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Several years after the original massacre, a novelist chronicling the original events brings a team together to search for the survivors in the same woods and find themselves lost at a deserted bunker underground holding a berserk rampaging killer created by a military experiment and must get out alive.
Review:
This is a pretty decent follow-up effort. One of the better aspects here is the rather strong tie-in that manages to connect the two entries, bridging the events together rather nicely for a pretty cohesive story. From the story of the missing persons from the past, including the characters from the original and trying to look into what happened at that spot in the woods to getting the backstory for who everyone in the team is with the trek through the woods getting to the house, this one leads to a pretty impressive setup here. As this generates some decent comedy while also letting the characters get to know each other and their history rather nicely, this early part works rather well with providing an intriguing lead-in to the slaughter later on.
That leads into the other fun part of the film. With their discovery in the underground bunker and all the different objects found within here, the unsettling nature of the bunker comes alive quite well with the darkened nature of the building and the growing realization that they’ve stumbled onto something bigger than they were led to believe. This brings them nicely into the killer’s hands with some fantastic kill scenes with the chained-up and tortured victims or out stalking the group throughout the bunker where he finds them. With the action providing some nice brawling and confrontations resulting in plenty of graphic deaths plus the single smartest move to pull off in a genre effort, there’s a lot to like here overall.
There are some issues to be had here. The first issue to be had is the somewhat overlong build-up that goes through some excruciating character scenes with the team coming together. Featuring the team at odds with the new guy because he’s an unknown to their tight-knit friends and all the hiking getting to the spot in the woods they need to be at comes off rather overlong and unnecessary with as much as shown. With the suspenseful yet uneventful explorations of the bunker once they arrive furthering that storyline, the killer doesn’t even arrive on-screen until the hour mark which leaves all the usual trappings in a slasher film off-screen for vast majorities of the running time leading to a somewhat bland experience.
The other real problem to be had here is the series of twists and turns that take this away from what the series had been in the first installment. That was a simple story of a group of people encountering a local legend about a deranged killer in the middle of the woods and was relenting stalking and killing people one-by-one, which is the complete opposite of this one. We’re introduced to military experimentations and underground secrets that come off like an entirely different scenario altogether with the series of revelations given in here which may or may not be appreciated by all. These issues are what drag this one down.
Overview: ***/5
Featuring enough to enjoy with some minor flaws to hold it back, this one emerges as a fine follow-up that’s a notch below the fun original but comes out with a watchable enough effort in the end. Give it a look if you’re into these types of slasher efforts or those who appreciated the original, while those who aren’t into either effort should heed caution.
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