Expected more

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The Plot:Evil wreaks pure havoc and bloody murder upon Leslie Van Hooten, a beautiful young girl, and her unsuspecting fellow grad students as they make their way to her family's extravagant and yet isolated estate. Peter (Bill Moseley- Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D, House of 1000 Corpses) and Irene Van Hooten (Leslie Easterbrook- The Devil's Rejects, Police Academy), the young girl's mother and father, leave the group alone for the weekend, so that she may mourn the anniversary of her boyfriend's shocking murder. But the peaceful weekend soon turns to hell when they find themselves being savagely terrorized by Cliff Rifton (Allan Kayser- Night of the Creeps, TV's Mama's Family), a crazed and recently released career criminal, and Buzz Schenk, his drug addict side kick whom are hell bent on raging a torturous killing spree. OK. So this is one of those one-year-later movies that's been done a hundred thousand times before.It's very slow in the beginning. Painfully slow with boring melodic music.Then it takes a weird violent turn but it's still not very interesting. It fact, it turns stupid. And back to being excruciatingly slow.The acting is an abomination. The inevitability factor is non existent.The movie truly sucks.

This is not a great modern-day horror movie, but it is a very effective one that I'd put somewhere between "House of 1,000 Corpses" And "House of the Devil", but also with a little rape-revenge thrown in. It has a very effective atmosphere with two college-age couples accompanying their friend "Leslie Van Hooten" to the wintry, isolated home of her parents on the anniversary of her boyfriend's death. It then turns into a pretty harrowing rape-revenge film when two criminals show up, who one of the couples had earlier tangled with. Rather than becoming a slick modern-day torture porn at this point though, these scenes have the more gritty feel of something like "Last House on the Left" (the 70's original). The movie then takes yet another turn, however, into a more "House of the Devil" territory, as is given away by the title (and perhaps the name of the main protagonist).The characters are little more well-drawn than in other movies. They're college graduates and seem a little smarter than usual. One couple is the typical pair of horn-dogs who can't stop humping each other, but the other pair are Christians who spurn pre-marital sex (more unusual and more interesting). This doesn't mean that ANY of them are necessarily going to come out too well though. This also has an interesting scene where one of the rapist-murderers gets out of prison and stops to visit his deeply religious mother. It's unusual to give a character like this any kind of third dimension, but it actually makes the things he does later more disturbing.The name actor here is Bill Mosely ("House of 1,000 Corpses"), who plays the "Van Hooten" father, but special mention must be made of the unknown cast of young people and the "democratic" use of nudity. The three girls all get naked. Nudity is pretty necessary here--you can't really make a harrowing rape-revenge film while pussy-footing around actresses' "no-nudity clauses". But even if some scenes are a little gratuitous, well, all horror movies today seem to have gratuitous (as in pretty unnecessary to the plot) sex scenes and shower scenes like this, but a lot of times they do them WITHOUT nudity, which is both pointless and annoying. Besides, the female characters are also the most well-developed and interesting--they're not just porn star types with fake looking breasts who are obviously just there to get naked. Calle Stephens and Emily Bennet are slightly better actresses, but Summer Bills deserves some mention, not just for being a very appealing little cutie, but I never would have found my way to this movie except I saw HER on the Investigation Discovery channel portraying the girlfriend of XXX superstar/possible murderer John Holmes (the same character played by Kate Bosworth in "Wonderland") and I was curious what else she was in. It's a pretty dumb motive for watching a horror movie maybe, but, hey, it worked out OK.

The lowdown is... this is an attempt to make a Rob Zombie-style grindhouse horror movie... by someone with absolutely no clue of what makes those films work. Really, I'll watch some awful horrid garbage and manage to find SOMETHING I liked about it... but I just could not manage that here. Mostly I'm going to blame the writing/directing. Nearly all modern movies look fairly decent... good technology and loads of film school graduates who know how to use it (even if they haven't a clue how to tell a story). The acting... it was hard to tell. A lot of it seemed awfully flat... but the script was so utterly putrid and it's not apparent there was an actual director on set... so... I'm loathe to blame the performers.Just plain bad... and not even the fun sort of bad.

The reviews for this certainly made me anticipate it more. As it is, it's not the usual horror flick you'd expect, but because I kept reading about its originality, I was disappointed in where it did go. It just seemed like too simple a set up, not to mention very obvious, since the film clearly doesn't hide that its hiding some secrets and it sort of becomes apparent early on with a glance exchanged between two characters. Still, the film works despite of itself, and the two leading male antagonists are quite good here, and seem to actually be having a lot of fun which helps the film's energy.Overall, nothing all that great or even all that good, but worth it.