Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsFam in the wilderness, murdery hijinks ensue
Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2020
Not terrible. A solid 4-star movie... Now I’ll pick it apart.haha
The sets are great, cast too...everything kind of lines up to create an interesting horror flick. The standard premise...family unit goes to vaca home in the wilderness and horror ensues.
The wife is utterly dislikable however...and that’s like 2 minutes into the film. She’s a pouty, over-possessive millennial who guilts and manipulates her husband bc he can’t drive to the wilderness house in the same car. Waaaa he has to do something and come up later that evening, so it’s just her and the kids driving up...ooooh big pity party there. While it’s attempted to be playful, it falls flat and comes across as entirely ‘spoilt brat having a tantrum.’ The husband, who seems like a legit good guy who is not actually hooking up w his secretary, even stops to buy presents for everyone on his way up....can you say whipped? Anyways, the husband is gonna drive hours into the dark, into the wilderness to get there late that evening. Again, the wife...manipulative. A normal decent person would say, oh honey don’t drive at night all tired and stuff—stay in the city til the next morning and come up then...but instead it’s like, you better be here. She’s ultra irritating. Did I mention he even stops to buy presents...not like gas station stuff either, actual thoughtful stuff. She’s a wench tho.
Anyways, the girls get to wilderness house and meet the obligatory, predatory, backwoods yokel who lives ‘down a yonder.’ He’s kind a creep...ok, a lot creep. The girls get into wilderness house and suddenly mom, who was obsessed with contacting hubs every 2 seconds, suddenly forgets she even has a cell, and abandoned it in the car. The girls go play outside **unsupervised** (cue scary music) while mom gives the audience the obligatory peek at her bod...unimpressive. That’s when trouble starts...
So a lot of interesting things happen. It’s similar to the Jason movies in a lot of ways. For the most part it’s pretty good. I do have to take huge exception with one scene where the camera angle and the entire shot was irksome. They were supposed to be upstairs when a guy comes across the front lawn. Mom realizes he could be helpful and tries to flag him from the second story window, however the shot appears to have her on the first floor, like low enough she could just open the window and hop out to say howdy. That was really awful footage and should have been reshot, but otherwise the whole scene was good, or rather would have been good.
There’s a lot that happens in this film so I won’t spoil it. It’s pretty intense horror, like the ‘good’ Jason movies(not like when he went to Hell or rode the Staten Island Ferry).
The actresses who played the girls were cute and good at their craft. They managed to walk the line of being scared, adorable, or incessantly screaming...which could be irritating but they managed to handle all the feels with great professionalism, especially for kids that age.
The most interesting thing about the film are the visual setups the director created to enhance the scare effects. There are a bunch of odd/scary things that happen, and the way their shown on screen makes them more scary. Like, the setups to each scene are actually scarier than the Killer. Killers are pretty much, u know, killers...but this one has these scary things precede his appearance, so it enhances the shock value bc as killers go, this one was pretty standard-issue.
Overall, irritating points aside, this is a solid 4-star film and one that imo would be worthy of a sequel.
