I found this on Netflix, saw it's low IMDb score (4.6 at time of this review) and thought I was going to be in for a SyFY channel phoned-in, cash-cow effort, but I was pleasantly surprised.
The plot is ramrod straight - five friends venture into the woods and find themselves terrorized by a man-(and woman) eating monster. They eventually hole up with three other survivors in an abandoned house and spend the rest of the movie there attempting various occasionally fatally ill-conceived survival and escape strategies.
The film has the expected tone of all woods survival horrors, throughout I was variously reminded of Evil Dead, Signs, The Descent, Demon Knight, and a lot of the old school animal attack features like Razorback, Alligator, The Edge, Rogue, Lake Placid and Grizzly.
The characters are more interesting than the usual stock group of victims. While they start out clichéd, the script allows them to develop and have a few unexpected moments of humanity and development. You don't care for them as much as you care for, say, the boat crew in Jaws, but you do care for them a little, which is much more than I can say for 99% of creature features out there. They make all the stupid mistakes of course (poor scripting), but the fact that I was saying "that was stupid, why wouldn't they just ..." at least shows I was engaged enough to not check out.
The most refreshing thing was the man-in-a-suit/animatronic monster. I love love love that the filmmakers went this route. They would have never had the budget for a convincing CGI creature and for most of the movie they keep their rubber monster suitably concealed in foliage and shadow that it's quite convincing and scary enough to be fun.
In conclusion, it's flawed, in some places greatly so, but you can see it was trying hard to be a decent horror film instead of a thoughtless straight-to-video flick. The monsters are alright, the cast is alright, the script could be better but at least characters die who you aren't expecting to die. It definitely deserves more than it's current low IMDb score. If you like monster movies at all, you won't be wasting your time with it. 6/10.
The plot is ramrod straight - five friends venture into the woods and find themselves terrorized by a man-(and woman) eating monster. They eventually hole up with three other survivors in an abandoned house and spend the rest of the movie there attempting various occasionally fatally ill-conceived survival and escape strategies.
The film has the expected tone of all woods survival horrors, throughout I was variously reminded of Evil Dead, Signs, The Descent, Demon Knight, and a lot of the old school animal attack features like Razorback, Alligator, The Edge, Rogue, Lake Placid and Grizzly.
The characters are more interesting than the usual stock group of victims. While they start out clichéd, the script allows them to develop and have a few unexpected moments of humanity and development. You don't care for them as much as you care for, say, the boat crew in Jaws, but you do care for them a little, which is much more than I can say for 99% of creature features out there. They make all the stupid mistakes of course (poor scripting), but the fact that I was saying "that was stupid, why wouldn't they just ..." at least shows I was engaged enough to not check out.
The most refreshing thing was the man-in-a-suit/animatronic monster. I love love love that the filmmakers went this route. They would have never had the budget for a convincing CGI creature and for most of the movie they keep their rubber monster suitably concealed in foliage and shadow that it's quite convincing and scary enough to be fun.
In conclusion, it's flawed, in some places greatly so, but you can see it was trying hard to be a decent horror film instead of a thoughtless straight-to-video flick. The monsters are alright, the cast is alright, the script could be better but at least characters die who you aren't expecting to die. It definitely deserves more than it's current low IMDb score. If you like monster movies at all, you won't be wasting your time with it. 6/10.