Director: Declan O'Brien
Year: 2012
Country: Germany/USA/Bulgaria
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Arriving in a small West Virginia town to celebrate a local holiday, a group of travelers must band together with the local sheriff to save the town from a race of inbred cannibalistic mutant hillbillies running wild through the participants looking for their incarcerated leader.
Review:
This here managed to be quite an interesting take on the franchise and offers enough good points to be entertaining. One of the better features here is the fact that this follows the traditions of the series which brings out a lot of great fun when it gets going. That includes a steady stream of action scenes here where that features the family stalking their victims in here, from the opening attack on the jogger in the woods, the great attack on the generator facility that also manages to secure the needed town blackout, the short attacks on the group as they scramble around town and the chilling ambush in the general store that comes off even better in the darkness with the tormenting laughs in the distance as well as being aided along by the notions of what happened before that has some real nasty moments together in here.
As well, there's a lot of fun in the last half, which is essentially a siege sequence where the family attempts to break into the police station where they've been held up as the different manners in which the group splits up allows them an easier time doing so gives the great scenes of them being stalked on the side-streets as well as the confrontations at the football stadium and in the streets in front offers plenty of outrageous kills, tons of blood splatter and gore and make up a lot of ground here. Still, there are some big flaws to be found here that hold this one back.
The biggest problem here is that the film is action-packed if not entirely original. There's not really a whole lot that really screams out to be breaking new ground here, especially with the absolutely ridiculous notion of abandoning the music festival guaranteed to provide tons of victims is dispatched and done away with hardly any attack on the patrons there, providing a really huge missed opportunity in favor of providing an even bigger exercise in gratuitous kills. As well, the move away from the forest setting and making it take place in a more civilized location is one of the biggest sins here that really takes away the ingenuity of the killers here who are reduced to more normal slashers, and takes a lot of their horror away.
By bringing them into the city, there's little about them that sticks out here with the film's biggest issue coming into play, the absolutely ridiculous kills here that are more to generate a big scene than which display any sense of rationality in the context of the scene. These are so ridiculous and so improbable that they reek of being set pieces designed to top what came before and really just don't work all that well here. The last flaw here is the fact that the film really seems to oversell the family as the big heroes here as it tries to make them seem cool more than frightening with the way it goes to such extremes to keep them alive. These elements give this one a lot better feel than expected, although it's on the bottom rung of the ladder in the series.
Overview: ***.5/5
An exciting addition to the series with some flaws keeping it down, this has the kind of enjoyable factors to be an entertaining entry in the series even with some detriments present. Those who enjoy this kind of slasher entry, appreciate the earlier entries in the series or are fans of the creative crew will have a lot to like here while those turned off by these factors should heed caution.
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