Borserie
it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.
Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin
The movie really just wants to entertain people.
Jenni Devyn
Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.
xposipx
Six friends enter the strange town of Old Mines for a weekend float trip. They quickly realize that the town is not friendly to strangers, and they are pressured to leave by the police. When the friends decide to continue their float trip anyway, terrifying secrets of the town surface. A seven-foot-tall deformed maniac, known by the townsfolk as The Boy is kept under lock and key by the town's mayor. The Boy's purpose is simple: kill outsiders. The Mayor of Old Mines releases The Boy and the maniac's hunt begins. One by one, the campers on their float trip are ripped to gory shreds by the enraged, deformed, hulking Boy.Gore is the main focus of the film and there are only a few good kills in it. The first crushed head was amazing; other than that there's lots of severed limbs, eye gouging, stomach gouging, and a steak through the head. The gore effects were pretty cool, but there wasn't nearly enough.The young director and crew show some promise, but they need to polish up on the basics first. Camera: A lot of the film was incredibly shaky. I'm sure it was done on purpose, but it really didn't work for the best. There were some creative angles here and there though that were kind of neat.Edit: On one side we have some really cool grainy effects, but other than that a few edits were off by a little bit.Lighting: The picture was way too white in a ton of the scenes.Music: The best part of the technical features. Really cool background music and effects here.Acting: This is what I was expecting to cringe at. Fortunately it wasn't too bad at all. All of the main characters were on the same b-movie sub-par level. The town folk were unnatural and some of the lines were crappy, but the acting surprisingly didn't take away from anything. No one stood out as good or bad, so good job.Final Thoughts: There wasn't a kill or scare of any kind until 46 minutes into it. There was way too much sappy pointless dialogue where there should of been pointless gore and killing. Some of the scene ran too long and at times the artsy type of editing was not working at all. For a sub-rosa movie...it was alright though. Next time focus on the gore because without real actors the dialogue and story won't work for you. Jeremy Wallace and Eric Stanze's efforts seem to be getting better and better...hopefully one of these days they can really put something nice together..I hope they keep it up and keep improving.
capkronos
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.
hip_school_preppie
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.
chexmix
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.
