Stop me if you've already heard this one before: A group of friends trespass on private property so they can gain access to a hard to find nature trail. Naturally, they find themselves deep in the remote woods with a ferocious redneck killer (hulking Larry Laliberte) who doesn't take kindly to any strangers on his land.
While writer/director Richard Swindell delivers a few effectively wince-inducing moments of nasty and gruesome violence and deserves some praise for giving this film a strong and unwavering nihilistic streak, he alas crucially fails to offer a single remotely likable or sympathetic character; instead each and every last person present herein is so incredibly annoying and unappealing that one quite simply doesn't care if any of these insufferably obnoxious jerks lives or dies, which in turn completely negates any tension this picture needs to really work. Moreover, the hackneyed pain-by-the-numbers script not only suffers from an appalling excess of tin-eared profane dialogue, but also doesn't do anything fresh or inspired with the trite premise (for example, it's pretty obvious the token black guy isn't going to survive). And while the gals are hot, there's unfortunately no gratuitous female nudity to compensate for this picture's glaring weaknesses. On the plus side, Jeff Samuelson's sharp cinematography makes neat occasional use of dissolves and overhead camera angles and the capable cast do their best with the shoddy material. But overall this one sizes up as a real clunker.
While writer/director Richard Swindell delivers a few effectively wince-inducing moments of nasty and gruesome violence and deserves some praise for giving this film a strong and unwavering nihilistic streak, he alas crucially fails to offer a single remotely likable or sympathetic character; instead each and every last person present herein is so incredibly annoying and unappealing that one quite simply doesn't care if any of these insufferably obnoxious jerks lives or dies, which in turn completely negates any tension this picture needs to really work. Moreover, the hackneyed pain-by-the-numbers script not only suffers from an appalling excess of tin-eared profane dialogue, but also doesn't do anything fresh or inspired with the trite premise (for example, it's pretty obvious the token black guy isn't going to survive). And while the gals are hot, there's unfortunately no gratuitous female nudity to compensate for this picture's glaring weaknesses. On the plus side, Jeff Samuelson's sharp cinematography makes neat occasional use of dissolves and overhead camera angles and the capable cast do their best with the shoddy material. But overall this one sizes up as a real clunker.