Hillbillies – Page 5

Mountain Monsters (2012)

It’s not a movie, but if you’re lucky enough to have Channel 201, Destination America, you must watch this incredible show.

Apparently the hills of West Virginia are teeming with all manner of cryptozoological fauna, including the Moth Man, the Grass Man, wolf men, dog men, devil dogs, wampus beasts, and every distant relative of Bigfoot known to mankind.

So who you gonna call? John “Trapper” Tice and his AIMS (Appalachian Investigators of Mysterious Sightings) team, that’s who!

Trapper and his boys like nothing more than an excuse to go crashing through the woods at night in search of legendary beasts spotted by their hillbilly brethren.

Besides Trapper, there’s Jeff, who’s in charge of research. In other words, he has a laptop and knows how to use it. Willy and Wild Bill build all sorts of outlandish traps, pits, and snares, in hopes of capturing a heretofore unknown specimen. They’ve never succeeded, but by god, it ain’t for lack of trying!

Huckleberry (Woooot! Team Huckleberry!) is a hunter and tracker with a ready supply of guns, ammo, and thermal-imaging gear. (“Wait! There’s something there! *pause* Now it’s gone!”)

And then there’s Buck, the fat-guy comic relief, who once locked eyes with the Moth Man himself—and fell over hypnotized! On camera! At least once per episode, Buck will gaze in wonder at sketchy video evidence of their mythical quarry (usually a misshapen shadow or tree branch that moved) and exclaim, “That thing’s huge!”

Needless to say, AIMS has never brought home any appreciable evidence of wolf men, aliens, blue devils, or thunderbirds. But I sleep safely at night knowing that these fearless investigators… are really, really far away across the country and unlikely to mistake me for the Beast of Bray Road or the bloodsucking Devil Dog of Logan County and fill my hide with buckshot.

Mountain Monsters is a hoot and it’s must-see TV. It’s also been renewed for a second season!

Blood Runs Cold (2011)

Based on the description, I thought this might be some annoyingly clever musical crossover, since its rather featureless lead character Winona (Hanna Oldenburg) is supposedly a successful pop singer.

To my relief, she doesn’t sing a note. She’s far too busy trying to elude the zombie-cannibal-miner-hillbilly freak that’s intent on having her over for a snack (if you know what I mean).

Blood Runs Cold is filmed somewhere near Stockholm, pretending to be North Carolina—which also accounts for the mercurial accents on display.

Winona (not a Judd) must four-wheel her way through several miles of frozen tundra to a remote house near her hometown that has been rented by her manager.

Note: If this guy was my manager, and he stuck me way-the-hell-out in some snowbound hick town without my entourage, he’d soon be nut-punched.

Winona (not a Judd) finds her crummy dump of a house, settles in and drives to a nearby tavern where she stumbles over her high school sweetheart Richard (Patrick Saxe) and his friends Carl (Andrea Wylander) and Liz (Elin Hugoson).

She invites them all back to her crummy dump (lots of time spent driving around in Arctic conditions just adds to its zero-budget charm) where they fall prey to a multifaceted maniac (David Liljeblad—who also serves as producer and co-writer) with a penchant for pickax perforation.

He falls a bit short of frightening, but I would have appreciated two minutes of backstory on where this colorful killer came from.

With Blood Runs Cold, director Sonny Laguna gives us a fascinatingly unadorned minimalist study in the field of hack-and-stack. Not one dime of this film’s budget was spent on set dressing, wardrobe, or the cast; it’s all earmarked for blood, guts, and decapitation.

And if you ask me, that’s money well spent.

Jug Face (2013)

“There’s some weird shit going on in the woods out there.”

I’m quite impressed with Jug Face, an absorbing and shockingly original jolt of indie-horror from writer-director Chad Crawford Kinkle.

I would almost venture to call it “magical realism” but that term fails to capture the profound depths of despair plumbed by teen protagonist Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter) as she tries to avoid getting tossed into a pit as a sacrificial offering to the nameless creature that serves as deity and protector to her ignorant hillbilly kinsfolk.

Jug Face is mighty grim stuff. Somewhere in the Appalachians, a degenerate community of yokels lives off the grid, dependent on sales of white lightning and dutifully tending the thing in the pit to maintain their squalid existence.

Ada, who has an arranged marriage to a doughy village boy in her future, is in love with her sullen brother Jessaby (Daniel Manche) who knocks up the unlucky lass whilst they’re cavorting in the woods.

Meanwhile, the thing in the pit is unhappy and Dwai (Sean Bridgers), the village idiot savant/high priest can’t figure out what’s wrong. Normally, when the god is restless, Dwai is compelled to bake a jug that looks like one of the villagers, who is then thrown to the deity.

So not only is Ada facing a loveless marriage while carrying her brother’s baby, but it appears she’s next on the pit parade.

The filth and blind ignorance in this hick settlement is so thick you’d need a weed whacker to get through it. It’s the act of “committing a sin” in such a terrible, unforgiving environment that accounts for the real horror in Jug Face, more so than the angry Lovecraftian entity in their midst.

Poor Ada tries everything she can think of to avoid the pit, but the superstitious ties that bind (and strangle) these slack-jawed citizens are simply too strong.

Reminiscent of Winter’s Bone, another film about an isolated community with its own strict code of behavior, Jug Face is like an anthropological field trip—or a bad dream induced by leftover Indian food.

In either case, you’ll be very grateful to wake up safe and sound in your own bed.

Frontier(s) (2007)

Parisian robbers on the run pick the absolute worst place in the universe to hide out.

Frontier(s) writer-director Xavier Gens is obviously smitten with genre classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, but I suspect there’s a sneaky tip of the beret to French New Wave provocateur Jean-Luc Godard, as well.

See? I studied film.

A quartet of reasonably attractive thieves flees the political turmoil and violent protests in Paris for the anonymity of the French countryside in order to count their loot.

Editor’s Note: What could people in Paris be upset about? You live in Paris! Have another creamy pastry and wash it down with some fine wine. Sheesh!

Unwilling accomplice Yasmine (Karina Testa) and her three co-conspirators decide to hole up in a bed and breakfast/pig farm staffed by Cannibal Nazi Hillbillies (Canazibillies?) and are soon horrified to find themselves on the menu.

The Canazibillies have little trouble subduing the brash bandits, but then old resentments boil over during the divvying of the spoils and the Master Racists are reduced to fighting amongst each other.

Even as Paris is awash in violence after the election of a right-wing candidate, Yasmine and her friends use the opportunity to commit robbery, preferring cold, hard cash to either side of a political demonstration.

I believe it is their cynical lack of commitment to a cause that makes them suitable candidates for torture and a trip to the pantry. What happens when shameless opportunists meet fanatical sadists? Well, it ain’t pretty that’s for sure.

Even if the revolutionary subtext is stretched thin to the point of invisibility, Frontier(s) provides effective shocks to the system with frantic regularity as captor and captive alike meet a succession of grim fates.

Perhaps Gens is pointing out that the fruit born of violence, whether calculated or chaotic, is equally bitter and deadly.

Don’t worry, this won’t be on the test.

Crowsnest (2012)

Another found-footage cautionary tale about the dangers of a rural partytime weekend with your buds. Seriously! It sounds like a good idea on paper, especially, as in this case, if the hot-girl-to-dude ratio is 3:2.

But just look at what can happen! And if you must roister in the wilderness, for the love of gawd, don’t videotape every moment along the way.

To be fair, this doomed crew has a better excuse to shoot endless footage of their misadventures than most (documenting evidence of a crime), but it’s become apparent to me that one look through the cursed viewfinder is enough to cook your goose.

A quintet of assholes (really, is it too much to ask that our protagonists have at least one or two attributes that aren’t thoroughly annoying?) pile into their four-wheel drive for a roadtrip to a remote cabin. Needless to say, they never arrive, because the dudes brilliantly decide to take a detour to the middle of nowhere (Canada? Upstate New York? Can’t remember. It ain’t important.) so they can buy a bunch of half-priced beer.

Seems like a solid plan until they find themselves pursued by a pack of cannibals in a Winnebago. Yep. Hungry, hungry hillbillies.

The camera gets passed around from one victim to the next, followed by the inevitable chaotic, shaky handheld footage as the unfortunates get chased through the tall timber by mostly unseen predators looking to restock their larders. After all, winter’s coming.

Crowsnest contains some genuinely grueling scenes of savagery, and the gradual decay of trust and friendship amongst the assholes is effectively documented. It’s a fairly slow journey into terror, but once you’re there the blood and guts come pouring down in buckets.

Writer John Sheppard and director Brenton Spencer aren’t reinventing the wheel here; they’re just reemphasizing a lesson we know all too well. A carload of attractive jerks doesn’t stand a chance out there.

Hatchet II (2010)

There’s no need to fret if you haven’t seen the first installment in writer-director Adam Green’s Hatchet opus. The burgeoning schlockmeister is generous enough to replay the origin of the “Bayou Butcher” Victor Crowley, a monstrous swamp-dwelling child cursed by his own mother who dies while giving birth.

Hey Ma, this is what happens when you opt for home delivery—and your home is a goddamn swamp!

The deformed kid is raised by his father, dies (I guess), accidentally killed by a blow from papa’s axe, and now it’s his alarmingly corporeal ghost that runs amok in the Louisiana bayou, artfully dismembering intruders. Was all of this backstory really necessary?

Marybeth (Danielle Harris) is the lone survivor from the first Hatchet movie, and for some reason, she wants to return to the swamp to retrieve the mutilated corpses of her family members that got chopped into kindling last time around.

Really? That’s the best motivation she can come up with?

Enlisting the aid of voodoo charlatan Reverend Zombie (the reliably nefarious Tony Todd) she puts a greasy white-trash posse together to salvage the remains and hopefully dispatch Crowley (Kane Hodder) into the afterlife on a more permanent basis.

Adam Green is a filmmaker of limited abilities and funds, so he wisely concentrates on the gruesome details in Hatchet II. A hunter gets his jaw torn off leaving his tongue lolling ludicrously. Another victim is bifurcated and while still alive, gets rudely yanked out of his skin by the spinal column. This is why we we’re here.

There’s no story, no character development, no life lessons; just plenty of splatter. Crowley is a Southern-fried Jason Vorhees sans mask and dressed like a cast member from Hee-Haw.

Is he a vengeful ghost? An unkillable thing? An evil spirit?

Don’t worry about it. Just savor the carnage. Green sends sufficient cannon fodder to foolishly confront the monster and the body count is more than respectable, while old pro Tony Todd chews the scenery with relish.

Reason enough, I say.

Shadow (2009)

You’ll have to roll with some changes in this Italian horror import, but ultimately, I think it’s worth it to do so.

Shadow begins as a fairly standard-issue case of strangers beware, before shifting gears about halfway through into a nasty bit of torture porn, and finally revealing itself in a Twilight Zone-meets-Dalton Trumbo finale.

David (Jake Muxworthy), an American soldier recently returned from the front lines of Afghanistan, decides a bicycle trip through a remote patch of Eastern Europe will help him unwind.

He meets a pretty fellow cyclist (Karin Testa) who invites him in to share her tent, and soon both are on the run from a pair of bloodthirsty poachers. (Ottaviano Blitch and Chris Coppola).

But wait! There’s more! After a few skirmishes, David and the poachers find themselves the unwilling guests of the evil Mortis (Nuot Arquint), a bony, bald albino with a penchant for inflicting pain—which he does.

And then there’s a twist ending that actually works for me.

What Shadow has going for it is devilishly effective tension escalation. Circumstances get increasingly grim without deteriorating into a pointless bloody mess, and Mortis has to be one of the creepiest kooks to come along in a long time.

Some of you will not care for the conclusion, but I appreciated the “one last surprise” card being played. Rather than a rip-off, I consider it a rather creative solution.

See for yourself. I doubt you’ll be disappointed, because this trip is a trip.

Wrong Turn 3: Left For Dead (2009)

Let us proceed quickly down the cinematic quality scale for Wrong Turn 3, a straight-to-video, filmed in Bulgaria turd salad, with almost no redeeming qualities. It’s overwritten, stars no one, and features only ONE hideously deformed inbred mutant cannibal hillbilly.

Well, two, actually. Maybe three. But mainly just one, and that’s not nearly enough.

Things open with a bang, as a quartet of rafters park their boats in the middle of the boonies to smoke weed and make out. (The first victim announces, “I’m going to burn a stick.” I think the last and only time I heard that phrase was in an After School Special about a high school undercover cop.)

Three of the four adventurers are summarily dispatched by Three Finger, the little freak from the first Wrong Turn, who looks kinda like Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown crossed with an old-timey prospector. He’s the one who hunts with a bow, and soon he’s racked himself up a nice little body count under extremely arrowing circumstances (see what I did there?).

Meanwhile, in some other movie, a couple of cops are transferring a school bus full of dangerous prisoners to, um, a different prison for some reason. The cops opt for the scenic route through rural West Virginia, where they soon find themselves stalked by a very determined little cannibal.

Ye gods, what’s with all the plot cluttering up everything? Note to writer Connor James Delaney and director Declan O’Brien: We don’t care about the racial tension between the two alpha prisoners, Chavez (Tamer Hassan) and Floyd (Gil Kolirin); we don’t care about an armored car full of money that conveniently turns up; and we sure as shit don’t care about the hopes and dreams of good-guy cop Nate Wilson (Tom Frederic).

We’re here for two (2) things: grim, grisly deaths and the constant threat of cannibalism. Your decision to downsize that threat into a single antagonist may have shaved a few bucks off the makeup budget, but it left Wrong Turn 3, sadly bereft in the terror department.

In your defense, there were a few decent kills (the truck-drag comes to mind) and a splash of nudity, so thanks for that. And the scene where Three Finger happily chows down on Chavez’s brain like it’s a piece of birthday cake was a nice surprise.

Well, only three more Wrong Turns left. Let’s hope this was the bottom of the barrel.

Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007)

On the scariness scale, if you stack Wrong Turn up against The Hills Have Eyes, I’ll take Wrong Turn every time.

Granted, it’s a close call, but I find the isolation of backwoods West Virginia to be more sinister and oppressive than the stony desert of the American Southwest. At least the latter is open country so it’s more difficult to be taken by surprise.

In the dense vegetation of the forest primeval, bad shit could be hiding anywhere—and probably is. Plus the deft artistry of monster makeup maestro Stan Winston in Wrong Turn is impossible to top.

As far as sequels go, Wrong Turn 2, while not up to the original, is pretty fun. Like Texas Chainsaw 2, this one plays it for gruesome laughs, as the story concerns the pilot for a reality show called Ultimate Survivalist.

As hosted by steely bad-ass Col. Dale Murphy (Henry Rollins, who seems right at home here), it’s a cheap Survivor knockoff, with six meat sacks representing the major victim food groups (slut, jock, buffoon, ass-kicker chick, etc.) tasked with remaining resilient in the boonies after the collapse of civilization.

But of all the boonies in all the world, they had to pick the stomping grounds of deformed, inbred cannibal hillbillies. Oh, is that the dinner bell?

As I alluded earlier, the makeup effects are merely competent in Wrong Turn 2, but that’s to be expected without the presence of Winston.

Also in the “tsk tsk” column is a needlessly determined effort by writers Turi Meyer and Al Septien to add “color” to the script by including a relationship subplot between plucky producer Mara Stone (Aleksa Palladino) and doofus director “M” (Matthew Currie Holmes) that has fuck-all to do with anything.

Even so, director Joe Lynch keeps the ball rolling, the blood flowing, and doomed campers fleeing like bunnies through the bush.

And to give credit where it’s due, Meyer and Septien serve up an ace in their depiction of the monstrous (though eerily familiar) cannibal clan, who provide us with a domestic tableau that’s not only a dead-on tribute to Texas Chainsaw Massacre (specifically the dinner table sequence), but also bloody revolting in its own right.

Is Wrong Turn 2 any more grotesque than say, Honey Boo Boo, or that awful TV family who seem to spawn every other month? Really, I couldn’t say, but I probably would tune in to a show about the daily adventures of this particular pack of deformed, inbred cannibal hillbillies. Coming next season to TLC…

Bonus: There are three more Wrong Turn movies available! Hope they measure up, but I’m certainly not expecting miracles. Stay tuned!

Madison County (2011)

In this critic’s opinion, there are entirely too many films coming down the pipe that ignore not only fundamental rules of genre movie making, but in basic storytelling, as well.

Take Madison County, for example. For the first 45 minutes we’re treated to an exhaustive and tedious overview of the hearts and minds of the soon-to-be dead collegiate protagonists. Is James going to “hook up” with Jenna? What happens when angry older brother Kyle figures out that wiseguy Will is boning his sister Brooke? Is Brooke going to leave Will to attend grad school?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we don’t give a shit, and never will. Writer-director Eric England should be reminded that less is more: less yack-yack-yack, and more whack-whack-whack.

James (Colley Bailey) and his photographer friend Will (Matt Mercer) decide to take a road trip to Madison County, Arkansas, to visit reclusive writer David Randall, who wrote a controversial book about local serial killer Damian Ewell.

But that’s a far too uncomplicated mission to be of any real interest, so England fills out the party with Will’s girlfriend Brooke (Joanna Sotomura), Brooke’s seething older brother Kyle (Ace Marrero) and her friend Jenna (Natalie Scheetz), and for nearly an hour the principles behave as though they’re characters in a romantic comedy that’s dreadfully unfunny.

And it’s for this reason I can’t recommend Madison County. (Can you tell I’ve been watching a lot of Chopped, lately?)

The news isn’t all bad. Madison County features a compelling psycho in the person of Damian Ewell, a relentless abomination who scampers about the boondocks wearing a darling hand-stitched cloth pig head. He’s portrayed by the formidable Nick Principe, who plays a similarly hostile guy in the Laid To Rest films, though this version is a deranged, brain-damaged hillbilly who likes to carve up nosy college students. And really, why should it be about anything else?

Look, I realize that there must be actual characters in horror movies, so that we can better keep track of who’s getting gutted at the moment, but for pity’s sake! We don’t need their life stories! When considering character development in a horror movie, let’s hearken to the model provided by the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

In other words, get ’em on, and kill ’em off. This isn’t Chekhov. Managing fewer storylines leaves more time for madness and carnage. And that’s what we’re here for, right?