Director: Sean Roberts
Year: 2020
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Home Invasion
Plot:
Heading out to a remote cabin-in-the-woods, a group of friends decide to hold a special retreat as their last chance to be together for a while but when they realize that a band of masked intruders has crashed their trip intent on killing them one-by-one and must try to get away from the maniacs alive.
Review:
This one was pretty decent if overall nothing special. This is pretty much only fun for the actual games played during the invasion where they go about trying to play some disturbing and demented games to get inside. The stress built up from before, the chaos of finding themselves stuck against the invaders who have the upper hand against them and the ability to constantly get them to do things that play into their hands by grabbing the group individually to play games with them makes for a somewhat thrilling time here. Given that this has some action and intensity with the confrontations as well as providing some gore, this is about all that works for this one.
This one does bring about some distressing issues. One of its main problems is the fact that absolutely nothing happens for a large part of the film as we get to know everyone involved. The whole group arriving and hanging out together serves this one well to get a little introduction going, but hardly any of them are memorable or even interesting with one couple trying to keep a pregnancy a secret, another is trying to make plans to spend more time together after school and the useless secrets that are brought up to try to put stress and strain on each other just doesn’t provide this with anything worthwhile. As none of them are interesting and this sort of behavior makes it hard to believe they’d all want to be friends anyway, it takes a toll on the film as a whole.
Likewise, that causes the other problem here in that the pacing to this one is so staggered and off-set that it’s quite land and dull for the most part. Rather than be around anyone interesting, this setup provides such an overlong introduction before anything happens that it’s quite easy to forget the actual home invasion part of the storyline. For such a short-running film as it already is to begin with, featuring these numerous uninteresting plotlines as much as it does since this goes way past the halfway point before they even attempt to enter the house even with those cleverly-missed news pieces which just makes the film a slough through the first half. That hardly any of it is interesting
Lastly, even though the finale has the best aspects here it’s still undermined by several rather large problems. The main issue here is the fact that so much of this one is so dark that it’s nearly impossible to make out what’s going on. With all the electricity drained and being forced to wander around in the dark trying to keep themselves wandering around in the darkness which means that it’s nearly impossible to tell what’s happening as that just keeps this quite difficult to make out. This is all coupled with the utterly moronic decision-making they display which keeps this moving along for the sake of the story which is always problematic with very little smart decision-making throughout here, and with an infuriating finale that doesn’t offer any resolution at all there’s a lot wrong with the film.
Overview: 0.5/5
While this is certainly a brutal and frenetic effort at the end when it counts, this is still undermined by a sluggish pace, nothing interesting happening when it’s not dealing with that and a troublesome finale even with a lot of positives mixed in. Give this a look only if you’re a fan of this kind of indie genre effort, while most others would be off-set by the flaws on display and should heed caution here.
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