Director: Shawn C. Phillips
Year: 2025
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Going out to a special music festival, a group of friends hoping to celebrate a friend's birthday together, run into a series of other factors that are revealed to be due to the inbred, cannibalistic hillbillies running around killing everyone they come across to repopulate the family.
Review:
This was an insufferably awful indie slasher without much going for it. In fact, the only really enjoyable factor with this one is the series of strong and generally enjoyable slashing scenes here that provide quite a lot of gore in this one. The attacks here aren't too bad, with the brief stalking and brutal consequences making everything quite fun with how the creatures come together, taking people out in random encounters around the desert. As it grows in intensity throughout the final half, where the mutants run wild against the various participants of the festival, resulting in some graphic setpieces, full of great practical effects, and intriguing enough action to make everything quite enjoyable, it highlights the fun aspects that work throughout here rather nicely. With the great design and intriguing character-work on the mutants themselves, who are somewhat imposing in their true form with their deformed visages and unconventional mutations, this comes off quite well in this one.
Beyond that, this was a terrible effort with quite a few major flaws. The randomized storyline is a major issue, featuring multiple storylines that could've worked as a means of keeping the interest going, but are crammed into this for no reason than to get supposed celebrities a chance at screentime, which is itself another big issue. The friends going out to the desert for a birthday party celebration is a decent enough idea, but to mix it in around the sidelines of the company trying to clandestinely destroy a truck abandoned in the area carrying toxic chemicals using woefully inept employees, the woefully lame sidestory about the past-their-prime rock group and manager who want to party with the hip youngsters at the festival, or the conspiracy theorists trying to get in contact with aliens dilutes the focus considerably. It's hard to remain invested in any of these storylines with how random and disorganized they all come across as so it's nearly impossible to remain focused on the movie proper.
With the whole thing furthered by the constant interjections and cutaways to different individuals they all encounter along the way, merely for the purpose of getting supposed celebrities on-screen or to highlight someone who obviously paid for a role to be in the film, considering its improvised origins. Since the film makes it so obvious that's the intent by how long it stays on the scene when they have no reason for being in the film. The characters are mostly obnoxious and annoying, and with so many involved in these subplots, it just keeps everything so hard to care about when we're constantly shuttled off to a different set of characters so frequently for brief inserts obligated by their social media payoff to be involved in this. In the end, it just highlights how cheap and flimsy it all is, with a scattershot, jumbled experience that never hides what it really is, which all comes together into being the problematic factors that hold it down.
Overview: */5
A massively underwhelming and generally unwatchable slasher, that this one only manages to get good because of violence and gore is really the main thing this has going for it, due to its majority of issues. Those who appreciate that or enjoy the creative crew here will have the most to like here, while most others out there should outright avoid it.
Comments
Post a Comment