Director: Mario Cerrito
Year: 2022
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Heading out into the woods, a group of psychopaths decides to focus their efforts on filming themselves hunting and killing others to serve up as food so others on the black market can watch their antics, eventually bringing them into contact with someone who did it earlier to give them pointers.
Review:
This was a decent enough continuation of the series. The way this one expands on the original, by focusing on the brothers who are trying to follow in the footsteps of the previous group by targeting random strangers and killing them so that the footage of their deaths and eventual devourment is available for the black market crew that the original plan failed at, serves to offer up a fine throughline that is immensely intriguing. The early stages here, exploring their depraved hunting methods of stalking the woods for potential victims and carving them up to the point of stumbling across the remaining survivors from the first attempt, who help them go through the motions of preparing a series of victims for a celebratory feast, is a just as solid way of continuing the cannibalistic tendencies featured here, and it carries on well enough in the second half once the collaboration is agreed upon.
Once everything is set up and the original survivor is granted into the family’s good graces, this turns from the first half series of psychotic killer-in-the-woods antics and becomes far more of a torture-style genre effort where we watch them taunt, dismember, and gruesomely prepare their victims for consumption. With the early scenes featuring them running through the woods, grabbing anyone they come across, from hikers under the pretense of being lost or random campers trying to enjoy the great outdoors, before knocking them out and taking them back to their compound to prepare. It’s once they realize that the other survivor is in the woods with them that this turns into more psychological taunting of their victims about not leaving or gruesome dismemberment practices, so that the parts of the body can be put into the feast and enjoyed.
There’s plenty to like here in that regard, but it does become a bit too one-sided in terms of what their feast eventually turns into. The feast scene is long and mainly involves the characters sitting around a table of body parts, laughing at how evil and twisted they all are, commenting on how the meat tastes while making painfully bad jokes about the body parts they are consuming, stalling the story so it repeats itself so often to get this point across. There’s little here about how changing up the structure beyond doing this same formula over and over again, and the only real attempt at bringing up a change is to introduce this bizarre line of dialogue that hints at tying into the previous film regarding some of their background connections, simply for the sake of getting this all brought together. Alongside the utterly laughable use of mannequin parts and inadequate practical props for the gore that are immensely off-putting, these all come together to hold this one down.
Overview: ***/5
A really solid and likable entry in the series, this one comes off slightly better than the original by expanding on the ideas presented there, even though there are a few big drawbacks holding this back. Those who appreciate this style of genre fare or who are fans of the original will have the most to like here, while most others out there might want to heed caution.
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