A trio of women go into the woods for a weekend, a hillbilly family headed by a deranged mother await and a decapitation early in the movie. Yummy kiddies, yummy.
Three college friends Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson), Jackie (Deborah Luce) and Trina (Tiana Pierce) have gathered for their annual camping trip, but this year will be memorable for all the wrong reasons.
After setting up camp and spending the night, their impromptu skinny dip session is witnessed by psycho hillbilly brothers Ike (Holden McGuire) and Addley (Billy Ray McQuade), who kidnap the trio during the night and take them back to mama (Rose Ross). The brothers and their beloved mama live deep in the woods, which helps serve a single purpose – they can torture their newly selected prizes without the prying ears of any neighbors.
One of the young ladies is picked to be the first to play the family game. One might think it would be a game of immediate death or torture, but instead, mother whips out her director’s chair and her boys and Jackie begin performing a scene –another scene, but then the scene itself turns ugly. The final scene is called “The Shirley Temple,” but the ending is far from a rendition of “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” Jackie is beaten and raped as the mother looks on in delusional delight.
Abbey and Trina finally escape the family’s clutches after finding Jackie clinging to life in the boys’ dresser in their room. Evading Ike in the woods, Jackie ends up dying from her injuries and the once meek Trina now turns blood thirsty, hell-bent on revenge.
Using their best MacGyver impression, Abbey and Trina make use of a hatchet, a car antenna and find a very unique use for Drano to wreak havoc on the boys and their mother.
Trina suffocates the mother with a clear plastic pillow in the shape of pair of breasts. If that’s doesn’t say class, I don’t know what does.
But as with every extremely low budget horror flick of the 80s, the women think they’ve made a clean getaway, but that would be way too simple.
When Abbey returns to the car the boys have trashed the motor. She quickly encounters a police officer, but when his hands begin groping her, she knocks his hat off to reveal dirty teeth himself, Addley. Instead of making another attempt to find help, Abbey returns to the same location she just left as any rational person would do, right?
As far as gore fest/exploitation films go, this was a real disappointment.
The movie began with a bang, with a decapitation, but it was the scene that followed that really showed some promise. The mother gives two young people from her support group EGO (Ernie’s Growth Opportunity) a ride and after the male losses his head, literally, the young woman is beaten by her boys, face and mouth covered in blood.
The mother begins to choke her and after delivering the closing line of the support group “Thank you for sharing and I love you”, she plants a kiss right now the woman’s mouth. Of course, when the young woman pulls away, there’s hardly any blood, but if there was continuity in a horror film, it would cease to be a horror film I guess.
Then you go through a dry spell. Except for a few small scenes with minimal blood, the movie is pretty clean so to speak until the end. The film clocks in at an hour and 30 minutes and it takes it an hour and 20 before the blood starts pumping once again. But once it begins, you get some nice action. Sticky and icky, just like ya like it.
That being said, the film has a nice blend of tense and funny moments, but it’s not enough to salvage the film. The film is so ridiculously bad at moments, you’ll find yourself cringing and wondering why a filmmaker who decided to make a gore/ exploitation film gave you anything except what was promised.
A few things I didn’t expect to see was a poster of John Travolta adorning the wall in the family’s living room or the Big Bird Sesame Street clock the boys awoke to, so one will catch themselves smiling a few times.
The Vault Verdict: While you get a decent payoff at the end, being made to sit through an hour and 20 minutes of nothing is too unbearable. Poor acting and even worse dialog is something not even a bucket full of Trix and save. If you’ve seen the flick you know what I’m talking about.
1.5 out of 5 Yaps