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Great Film overall

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

As you all know I am a big supporter of the independent scene. Now and then a gem pops up and them I am glad to have it in my collection, mostly signed and personalized by the director. But sometimes the trailer is better than the movie itself. This flick have this problem. When you watch the trailer you have seen it all, and the teaser that Eric Stanze (Scrapbook) is involved only makes it worser. By involving Stanze geeks are really thinking that they will get gore from beginning until the end. It isn't, the movie fails in delivering a hillbilly gorefest, due the storyline and due the performances. The storyline can be told in a few sentences. Six friends go camping but at the wrong place at the wrong time. End of story. When they've been killed the acting fails. When one of the girls is seeing her friend dead,his head smashed by the killer, the way she reacts fails. The other problem with the movie is when you start watching it you can see immediately the low budget problems. When they walk into the sun, the iris of the camera isn't correct, they don't use ND filters. Wrong, and when they scream the sound goes into red. But you can see through this by saying, okay, no budget, but the car scene is too long, the cop scene, too long. In fact it takes the last 25 minutes before something really happens, before the slaying starts. But when it starts it's all done in a gory way. Intestines flying away, heads crushed by bricks. Girls smashed in their face with bare fists. And that's the only reason why I gave it a 4. Could have been much better.

I'm a patient guy and have no problem with slow-moving horror films IF the slow-moving parts actually serve some kind of purpose, such as helping to define characters, setting up an interesting storyline, creating atmosphere or mood and/or helping to build suspense. However, when a simple shot-on-video slasher/gore film spends the first 45 minutes (!) completely gore or murder free you know you've got a problem. Aside from briefly establishing the back-story of the killer, the film spends the majority of the first two-thirds of its run-time showing a bunch of obnoxious "friends" screaming profanities at one another as they drive around in the boonies, visit a general store, go canoing and set up their camp. Again, I have no problem with dialogue as long as the dialogue is interesting and serves some purpose. Here it's not the least bit interesting and creates tedium right from the start. In fact, I have a strong suspicion that the majority of the dialogue in this film was just made up on the spot. Characters frequently and awkwardly talk over top one another like it's some kind of improv class from hell, and there's no attempt whatsoever at characterization. It's a real endurance test to even make it to the first murder scenes as the film the film doesn't even really hit any kind of stride until the final 20 minutes, when nearly the entire cast thankfully gets butchered.In the small town of Old Mines, Missouri, the townspeople are hiding a deep dark secret. The religious fanatic mayor (Ed Belt) hates people from out of town visiting the area. He views them as being impure and thinks they are possessed by demons and wants no part of them. When tourists can't take the hint to high tail it out of there, the mayor unleashes his incest-bred mongoloid son on them. The son - named Dewey or just "The Boy" - is a big, hulking, mentally-retarded behemoth dressed in overalls and a pillow case over his head, who's kept locked up in a shed until he's needed to get to "work" killing off anyone dumb enough to refuse to leave the area. In come six people; Eli (Jason Christ), Carol Anne (Julie Farrar), Buster (Chris Grega), Mia (Emily Haack), Judy (Robin Garrels) and Tim (Todd Tevlin), who fumble through their awkward scenes seemingly in a contest to see who can throw out the "f bomb" the most times. The people in town, including the sheriff (Joseph Palermo) and the killer's sister (Trudy Bequette) try to scare them off, but they don't listen. "The Boy" is then set free and goes on a rampage, also killing some other people in town along the way. "The Boy" doesn't like to use weapons much of the time and uses his bare hands to rip open heads and chests. The movie does eventually provide some gore, but most of it is at the very end. For a 75-minute film, that's otherwise pretty worthless, to wait that long to start flinging around the red stuff, is pretty much unforgivable. If you've read this far, know the basic plot already and still feel like you must watch for whatever reason, I'd recommend fast forwarding until the first murder scene occurs. The rest is a waste of time.

For an extremely low budget movie, this flick was pretty good. The sound is shoddy in spots (a boom Mic could have been the answer)and the night (dark) scenes appear a little grainy. The acting wasn't terrible(not saying it's good either), but the actors themselves were pretty ugly. There's some effects that made no sense to me during dialog, like when Billy visit's the campers and tells them of what's going on in the town. During her story they kept cutting to the campfire with an annoying high pitched noise. I'm not sure what they were trying to achieve with this. However, I like the story, as it has that classic early 80's babes in the woods getting stalked by maniac that has an obvious deformity type of plot. The killer is very reminiscent of Jason in Friday the 13th Part 2. It's kind of like a Jason and Leatherface character mixed together. There's plenty of gore in this one too.

I read the reviews and really wanted to like this little movie; however, a promising idea goes nowhere here, derailed by unbelievable (poorly-drawn) characters and god-awful dialogue. Believe me, I was _not_ expecting _Citizen Kane_, but if a film like this is going to work at all it can't just be thrown together to hang limp on a few showstopper gore effects. A lot of the dialogue (especially that of the ill-fated campers) seems improvised ... and poorly improvised, at that. Furthermore, there is simply no atmosphere. I'm guessing it was for lack of a budget, but the few interior scenes in this movie look like something from a Larry Buchanan effort. There's no sense of terror or dread: just miles of limp talk, then *smack* another head is cracked open.Hoping the next indie movie I watch has more heart than this one.