Director: Harvey Wallen
Year: 2022
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Trying to bring their family together, a man brings his rebellious teenage daughter and new wife along on a family trip out to the wilderness for some time together, but their chances are impeded when a psychotic incestual cannibal family starts to hunt them down and kill them.
Review:
This was an enjoyable enough if highly flawed effort. One of the better features here is the nice and quick pace that, despite some of the issues involved here, manages to keep it enjoyable enough throughout here. With the immediacy we get to know about the family and their struggles which sets up the daughter leaving and gaining the friends who sneak out to the house, the setup here comes off quite nicely to get to the action quickly. The finale also manages to be quite fun due to this with the eventual invasion of their house which has some hard-hitting confrontations involved, giving this enough to like to hold it up.
There are some big flaws here. One of the bigger drawbacks is the incredibly rushed and uninvolved storyline that never really brings any kind of investment into what's going on. Spending all of five seconds to get a stereotypical stepmom/stepdaughter relationship involving a moody Goth teenager rebelling against her parents, this plays into the contrived setup of how they get into trouble with the couple getting comfortable spelling out what to do and suggesting the visit almost immediately with no setup or connection which all reeks of contrivance to move the film along rather than doing something different with its setup.
That's not helped by the film's worst culprit in the most obnoxiously stereotypical villains to exist in this kind of film. Relying on the tired and cliched notion of a psychotic backwoods family that gets away with all kinds of cruel and barbaric tortures that everyone in town seemingly knows about in dark whispers but does nothing about makes this far less imposing and devastating than it should be. Instead of getting swept up in the terror of what's going on, the obviously cliched and overwhelming amount of familiarity featured here keeps this one feeling formulaic and unoriginal.
On top of all that, the film struggles with an unfortunate lack of overt genre brutality in what should've been a story rife with such material. As all the storylines here eventually involve the psychotic couple being a cannibalistic incestual pair of brother and sister, nothing is really made of it with nearly every sort of kill happening off-screen and no hint of cannibalism or incest suggested. All we get is dialog hinting that each of these traits occurs, but that's it and a distressing detail involving their series of snuff tapes about the murders is never shown making that a huge missed opportunity as well. These factors end up doing a lot of damage to the film.
Overview: */5
A missed opportunity effort without much going for it, this is highly underwhelming and not that worthwhile of a genre effort that is kept above the bottom of the barrel but not by much overall. Those who appreciate this kind of indie genre style will be the main target for this one while most others who don’t enjoy any of these factors should heed extreme caution if not outright avoid this one.
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