• Written and directed by Jeremy Wallace
• Starring
  • Jason Christ
  • Julie Farrar
  • Joseph Palermo
  • Trudy Bequette
  • Doc Brown
• Produced by Chris Belt
• Executive produced by Ron Bonk and Eric Stanze

The presence of this DVD in my stack of screeners brought despair to my heart. A shot-on-video horror flick about a bunch of twenty-somethings on a camping trip, stalked by a deformed hillbilly killer? Are we STILL making those? I scrunched up my shoulders and settled in for an evening of wooden acting, stereotyped characters, and threadbare plot cliches punctuated with lots of uninspired gore in cheap outdoor locations.

Imagine my surprise when it started out… well, rather good.

The major strength of this movie lies in the intersection of competent actors with a flexible script. Actually, “script” may be too restrictive a word — it was clear long before I watched the behind-the-scenes footage that each scene was only vaguely sketched out in terms of where it started and where it had to finish, and the actors were trusted to improvise their dialogue and interactions. With most working-for-pizza casts, that would have spelled utter disaster; here, though, our performers were competent enough to sound natural as they banter and drop tidbits of necessary information for the viewer. Imagine The Blair Witch Project, without the conceit that they’re filming themselves (and the accompanying switches between color and black-and-white).

So. Five friends in an SUV are off for a canoe “float trip” down the Missouri river, starting from the secluded town of Old Mines. Of of the appeals of the location is the legend they’ve heard of some mysterious killer who does in anyone not from the town. Of course, as with most third-hand legends, they can’t agree about what they’ve heard: Is it a deformed mountain man? A Jason-style killer? A captive Bigfoot? It doesn’t matter; in true worldly collegiate fashion, they decide that the best way to find out exactly what stalks the woods around Old Mines is to go make themselves the bait. Obviously, none of them expect anything to happen; they’re just being cool, hip, ironic types expecting that they’ll deflate a legend with no veracity and later be able to bitch and moan that, despite the legends, nothing happened to them.

Did someone mention hunting the Sasquatch?

Their first taste of local hospitality, before they’ve even reached anything that could be considered the”town limits,” comes in the person of Deputy Foxy (Joseph Palermo), the puffed-up local lawman who pulls them over and swaggers all around mainly because they’re not locals. (“I see we have a little problem with authority.”) He rustles them out of the SUV and makes them watch while he unpacks their trunk and dumps out all their beer. This is a warning, naturally, that the good ol’ folks around Old Mines don’t like “their type,” especially girls with tattoos and piercings all over hither and yon. (One of the problems with the realistic ad-libbed dialogue is that it’s murder to pick up on characters’ names — after all, they know each other, so they don’t feel the need to introduce each other for the audience. I’ll try to clue you in as we go along, but I make no promises.)

Of course, they have no intention to heed such an extralegal warning, but we in the audience know better, especially when Foxy gets on the radio and tells the sheriff to “alert the mayor and The Boy.”

In town, the campers meet the sixth of their party (I swear, I’ll get good with the names real soon) at the lone grocery story, and also meet with more local suspicon and muttering. (Along with more blatant, “Git the hell outta town!” threats.) The only semi-friendly person they meet is Billie (Trudie Bequette), the mayor’s super-skinny daughter. Of course, by that point they’ve experienced enough backwoods hospitality that they don’t cotton to Billie’s friendly overtures, and head out to the river.

The mayor (Ed Belt), though, isn’t nearly as perky about their guests as Billie is, and together with Foxy and the sheriff (Kevin Golden), they decide it’s time to release… The Boy (Doc Brown). And who is The Boy? Oh, he’s the child that the sheriff has kept confined in a concrete toolshed for decades with a pillowcase over his head, beating him and training him to kill outsiders. And it’s time for him to go to work.

What’s he complaining about? Doesn’t he know how much space like this would go for in New York?

By nightfall, the fodder — er, protagonists have floated a ways downstream and are encamped on the shore, where Billie finds them. It’s during her combined warning and exposition that I started to suspect that I’d have to downgrade my assessment of this movie from “Awesome” to “Commendable.” It’s not that Trudy Bequette is a worse actress than the rest; she would probably have done just as admirably improvising her performance as a modern, ironic twenty-something. But she’s called on to improvise a performance as a girl raised in virtual seclusion, in a paranoid backwoods town that regards outsiders with murderous suspicion… That’s a little harder to pull off while ad-libbing whole conversations. Anyway, the gist of her revelations is that The Boy is her brother, born of an incestuous relationship between her father the mayor and his sister, and the mayor has managed to convince everyone in Old Mines that the “outside” world is entirely evil, and The Boy is necessary to keep the locals from being corrupted. (I’ll admit, this would be a little more believable if the Old Miners had shown any sort of variant society — strange clothings, religious habits, what have you — instead of just looking and acting like people whose town doesn’t have a freeway exit. Heck, the mayor even has a computer on his desk; how much effort is he really putting into keeping the outside world from corrupting his town? Has he even got NetNanny?)

Having heard enough of that sort of thing, thank you, the campers send Nillie on her way with much derisive chortling. But that night… one of the campers – hey, his name is Tim! (Todd Tevlin) — wanders off to take a leak, and The Boy crushes his head with his bare hands. (Not much of a tool user, The Boy.)

You definitely can’t call this a brainless flick.

And then he immediately kills all the rest in their sleep and the movie’s over.

No, wait, he doesn’t. For reason that can only be described as “It’s in the script,” he leaves the body there and wanders off. The other campers discover their dead comrade in the morning, much hysteria ensues (especially with his girlfriend, Carolanne (Julie Farrar) — she’s the smart one, I think), and they decide to get away down the river.

But meanwhile, there are other things happening in Old Mines. Foxy discovers that The Boy has killed one of the locals as well. And when the mayor goes out to discipline The Boy for breaking the rules, he find himself scattered across the lawn in itty-bitty pieces. Same goes for the sheriff and Foxy.

All of whiche brings up a question as big as either of the Dakotas, but which the movie studiously avoids addressing in any way: Why did The Boy go on a rampage and start killing locals? What set him off? The fact that there’s nary a glimmer of justification given further downgrades this movie from “commendable” to “acceptable, with a good opening.”

I always thought chum-fishing was more of a salt-water thing.

And I’m sorry to say that things slide further downhill from here. The campers meet Billie on the riverbank, and she tells them to stay on the river and keep going south, where they’ll be safe. Most of the remaining campers, though, including muttonchopped Eli (Jason Christ — see, I told you I was gonna get better about identifying characters) take the occasion to get up in her face and yell at her about the death of their friend, as if she hadn’t come to their campsite the night before to warn them to leave. I know that people under stress will act irrational, but the irrationality on display here doesn’t make sense even by those relaxed standards.

And from here… the slide downhill becomes a veritable slalom, as all of the slasher cliches you know and disdain are used as an excuse for story. The campers split up, with Carolanne and someone else heading back via land toward the cars; the rest intend to continue downstream, but not before The Boy strides out of the woods and kills two more of the girls, leaving Eli alone, treading water downstream. Then, when Carolanne and friend find the home of Stella Mae (Ceily Davis), The Boy’s mother, she invites them in… and The Boy bursts out of an interior closet! The hell?

From here to the end, we’re treated to as much offscreen teleportation as one would normally see in half a dozen Friday the 13th sequels, with The Boy appearing at his mother’s house, then on the riverbank right where Eli ended up, then back at the house… From the sequence of events here, you’d swear that the woodlands around Old Mines and the river covered all of maybe two acres. (Oh, and in case you’re keeping count, somewhere along here Billie and The Boy run into each other, and despite her protestations of filial solidarity, he thumbs out her eyes and kills her.) The movie’s now been downgraded to “Good bits, being dragged down by too much crap.”

“But I shall soon be secure within the confines of my Batcave!”

Now despite the headlong disintegration of the semblance of any sort of plot, there are still keen little touches throughout. The Boy has two plastic doll limbs on a string around his neck; a flashback shows us that his mother gave him the doll, which his father promptly seized and broke: “I’m not raising you do be a pussy, I’m raising you to kill people!” And when Stella Mae invites the campers in, she brings them into a pristine room, decorated with untouched toys appropriate to a little boy. It’s the bedroom that, had things been different, would have belonged to The Boy. And there’s a shot of The Boy walking through a field at dusk, surrounded by fireflies, that really makes me long for a movie good enough to justify its inclusion.

But such touches of directorial inspiration can’t even attempt to hold things together as everything falls apart. It eventually becomes apparently that, in addition to not having a set script, there wasn’t even really much of a plot behind the project. It was more of a scenario, and the only way they knew when to end things and roll credits was when they run out of people to kill.

Except for the rest of the Old Mines locals; the idea that The Boy is finally turning on his tormentors never really gets going. Maybe it’s being saved for the sequel.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 12
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0