Director: Brendan Rudnicki
Year: 2025
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Trying to find a spot for the night, a group intended to be on-set at a film shoot in the area get stranded at a remote cabin which is soon inundated by a group of asked intruders looking to play a series of brutal games that involve killing them in graphic ways forcing them to get away alive.
Review:
Overall, this was a fairly fun and somewhat enjoyable found footage effort. One of the better elements here stems from the strong and enjoyable setup that brings everything together incredibly well. With the group arriving at the house with the intent to find a property that will work as a filming location and managing to negotiate a way to stay there for their shoot, everything comes together with a fun way of starting this with a fun reason why the group is out there in the middle of nowhere. While the group is staying there and preparing for the arrival of the rest of the crew, the few hints that this one goes for involving the masked lunatics who are following them around the property provide a fantastic intensity that adds a solid sense of creepiness to this one.
That provides a solid baseline for the later stalking scenes, where it’s revealed that the lunatics are intending to enter the cabin and begin torturing and killing others with them. These scenes play off quite nicely with the idea of the unfeeling and just plain eerie figures standing there trying to instill fear so that they panic and make mistakes to bring them into contact with the killers around the property in some chilling encounters. Since it introduces them quiet early on and never relents from that point on, the escalating encounters and brutality get some fun moments here which offer up a strong sense of tension with how they’re going to get out and prevent the killers from getting inside with the close-quarters filming style and great gore having quite a lot to like.
There are some slight flaws with this one holding it down. The biggest issue here is the absolutely moronic sense of stupidity on display that keeps the group in danger the entire time. There are so many instances where they continually discuss and debate what’s going on to the point of them forgoing somewhat sound advice and opportunities to leave by keeping them in harm’s way only through that setup. It really brings down some of the film’s suspense when most of it is done because of inherently dumb and stupid characters much like how the finale continues on through a series of situations involving them being stupid than anything, and with a rather underwhelming finale that tends to break the found-footage rules it’s set for itself, are what come to bring this down the most.
Overview: ***/5
A generally solid if somewhat problematic found-footage feature, there’s enough to like here that it has some likable qualities, but gets brought down by some big issues that keep it from getting higher in the genre. Those with an interest in this style of genre fare, are curious about it, or are fans of the creative crew will have a lot to like while most others out there might want to heed caution.
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