Director: John Migliore
Year: 2020
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
Living alone in the wilderness, a family of murderous cannibals accidentally let one of their captives go free but being mortally wounded collapses in the woods and is turned into a strange creature who goes on a rampage in the area making it difficult for them to keep up with their tactics until they deal with it.
Review:
This was a pretty enjoyable genre effort. Among its better features is the highly engaging set up that contains a clever enough story to bring together the murderous cannibal family and the creature feature fans. Offering the first half mainly as a means of setting up the clan of cannibals out hunting trespassers in the woods and holding them captive for food or work for them to stay alive, this gives a wholly enjoyable set up to where the scenes of them hunting in the area and taking them back to their camp contain quite a lot of enjoyable aspects seeing how they treat everyone and what they do to stay out the authorities’ notice.
That leads into the second half of the film where it’s mainly the deformed creature coming after the family and anyone else it can. This offers up a nice series of ambushes scenes where it comes out of nowhere and smashes its victims to death, leading to a high body-count and plenty of cheesy fun as it generates all sorts of random encounters in the area. The attacks in the woods set up the craziness of the final half where it goes into an inadvertent assistant killing their victims in a corralled electrified fence, and with the rousing finale where it breaks free and attacks them leads to some cheesy fun, much like the endearing costume.
This one does have some minor issues. The main problem is the seeming inconsistency on display with the creature who doesn’t behave in any kind of rational manner. The concept of its creation is a total mystery as to why it happened to that particular individual or how it got conceived in the first place, while the idea of it interacting with the family and captives changes according to the scene. Some scenes feature it helping the victims trying to get away from others while other times it tends to kill them just as quickly even before helping them, and with a disturbing lack of gore in the kills, this is somewhat distracting.
The other minor factor here is a lot of inconsistencies and head-scratching moments about how the family has operated under the radar for as long as they have. With no real mention about how they’ve managed to operate not just taking victims whenever they want to, but how they’ve managed to go about obtaining film projectors, closed-circuit monitoring systems, electric-penned fences and walkie-talkies in the area which would be a giveaway to what they’re doing. Whether these issues are truly detrimental or not is up to a viewer’s discretion, but they stand-out regardless.
Overview: **.5/5
A highly enjoyable mash-up of a psycho family slasher and creature feature, for the most part, there’s enough to make this one quite enjoyable even with a few issues holding it back that might not be truly detrimental. Give this a look if you’re a fan of these kinds of cheesy indie efforts or intrigued by the setup while most others who are into these factors should heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment