Rating: E
Dir: Jake Zelch
Star: Roni Jonah, Jasper Evans, Kat Underwood, Tamara Glynn
“Deep in the forgotten backwoods, Tara and Meghan encounter a feral cult of cannibalistic freaks, who have been waiting for their next victims.” That was the Tubi synopsis. Technically true. But, Christ, this is terrible. Chris showed up in the middle, and it wasn’t long before she was making scathing pronouncements. For example, about how, on my death-bed, I would regret wasting my time on this kind of shit. I can’t argue. It’s certainly 70 minutes I won’t get back. Mind you, she was watching a video on her phone, of a swan and her cygnets crossing the road. So, we’re not exactly talking about a productive use of her time either. I still can’t argue she came out ahead.
This is a remake of a film by the same title from 1993. That was directed by Donald Farmer, who shows up here as a “college professor”. Quotes used advisedly, since it’s the least convincing law campus I’ve seen. It’s appropriate, however. Tara (Jonah) and her friend Meghan (Evans) are the least convincing aspiring lawyers I’ve seen, and I shared a flat at college with a law student. Tara and Meghan look more likely to have a career as waitresses at a lower-tier microbrewery. They head off on a girls’ weekend, though before they encounter the “cannibals”, there’s an excruciating nine-minute sequence of them walking around and having a picnic. I kid you not. Even the film gets bored with itself, and undercranks the footage to hurry it up.
Oh, boy. That reminds me about the crappy digital effects, attempting to reproduce things like tracking marks and tape noise. Stop. Just stop. Eventually, the students encounter two people who could not be more obviously creepy if they tried. And, boy, are they trying. There was previously another woman (Glynn) who gets abducted, chained up in a basement. The film then forgets about her entirely, without explanation, despite her finding a working chainsaw in the basement. This does demonstrate the low quality of the villains here. They’re so stupid as to be utterly unthreatening, meaning there is no sense of peril for the heroines.
Somehow – and if I remain vague on the details, it’s because the movie is often confusing or incoherent – it ends up with Meghan climbing into and out of a coffin, in the middle of a field. She cuts a guy’s dick in half, which sounds an awful lot worse than the bargain basement effects can deliver. She gets a chainsaw as well (really, the power-tool security here is the worst) and bisects one of the cannibals. Remarkably, without getting an additional drop of blood on her. It all ends in a shameless rip-off of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Now, I have not seen Farmer’s version. I can’t say if this is just a spectacularly inept remake, or if this lovingly reproduces how terrible it was. Its IMDb rating is worse, at 2.1. Though at time of writing, the remake’s 3.0 is based on a mere twelve votes. It’ll soon be thirteen – and that average will not be going up, I guarantee you.