Best movie ever!

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

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.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

It is hard for most to pull themselves away from all the tech crawl crap of our modern, lame times. Yet for those with an appreciation for survival and self reliance, you will know the merits or setting out on your own.To live out in the woodlands, let alone survive in a situation of duress or sickness , without hospitals, restaurants or everything we take for granted in our cities, such a situation can be terrible indeed.For a seemingly predictable tale of a family's camping sojourn gone awry , I thought I knew where it was going. MY mind sought the closest movie in a similar setting I could think of, being Antichrist with Willam Dafoe. And that movie , just as The Barrens, had its ups and downs in terms of quality, not just suspense.But The Barrens was something I could identify with at its most nervous or sickly. Having lived in the mountains, surrounded by nature, when something happened, you had to be prepared yourself. PERIOD. Money was no good either. Couldn't pay a tree for entertainment or bribe an animal for the meat off its bones. Whatever you came with, you had to use it and hope you prepared well enough. And having been ill out there, alone, in the fallen snow and deathly cold, I know what its like to suffer from illness with no recourse but to trudge onward.Though the acting was a tad on the lame side, I still appreciated it at its most basic level. There was little CG which allowed for appreciation of the natural surroundings. Which is what its all about. Myths about forest dwelling monsters or creatures that go bump often are part myth expanded upon a truth so ancient and nearly forgotten that the moral is lost: Nature will always have its way, there's no good or bad. Just a beginning and an end.I would say its a high end B movie at best, which compared to all I have seen, is high praise lol. Happy Trails.

Bad direction, in all departments. The script and the characters do not match, so that is bad casting. Or is it bad script only, and the actors were stuck with dud scenarios? Or were the actors not let in on the vision of the script? It is not easy to tell where this went wrong. The 'family' behave as if they are all strangers, when they are supposed to be a family. Bad casting, script or direction. Probably not the actors fault. One thing is for sure, the main protagonist does not make sense and is entirely unconvincing. This could be the main problem perhaps. So many characters do dumb and illogical things in this it is unimpressive. You want characters to do the odd clever move in order to appreciate the concept of humanity.It's kind of annoying that people connected with crappy films do bullshit reviews of those crappy films which misdirect us in the public whom desire to spend our time watching something of quality.The score is good and the twist near the end is good. That is about it though. A pity. Could have been great with better casting and a more talented director.

It's not the worst horror movie I have seen and I wished it wasn't a horror movie at all. Basically the "Legend" of the Jersey Devil is just a badly integrated background plot, anything would have done the job here, even a story about a wild bear going rampant...The opening scenes are like in every B-grade horror movie, a pair wandering through the woods, getting lost, finding strange things and then a sudden cut and the actual movie begins. Of course at the home of a (not so) happy family preparing for a camping trip. After finishing the movie I felt the opening scene completely useless, it does not even set the right mood for the movie that follows.As the story develops (painfully slowly) we find that the patchwork family is pretty normal, although the amount of problems presented here is a bit too much in my opinion. There are some small references (or should I say stolen ideas) to characters and stereotypes from other great horror movies and authors of the past. You soon learn that the father is a bit stressed out and is pushing the family to some personal goal, not a camping trip.This is actually the only thing that was kind of well done in this movie. The "secret" about the father and what drives him is well embedded and this part of the story told in a good pace. What couldn't believe is that a living father would ever endanger his family in such a way he does, long before he lost control about his decisions. That guy neglects every signal of impeding danger and he ignores every helping hand, even from his beloved ones. This is too much story crunching and totally unreal.The middle part of the movie is still the best part, as the plot gets denser and things start to happen. When all hell breaks loose I didn't believe in a monster flick anymore and it felt good. It was way more proper to see this movie as a psychological (horror) thriller...and then the final scenes happened.Everyone screams too much, stumbles over invisible branches on the floor all the time and a silly scene with a shotgun hobo and a wild cat are added to prolong the really idiotic last scene that spoils the entire movie. Or one could say it completes the circle as the final scene fits very well with the opening scene. Both belong into a C- movie while the middle part is, though over-constructed and a bit far stretched, quite good compared to the rest.It felt like two movies, the monster version is something I wish I hadn't seen at all, while the middle part had some Hitchcockian elements.Stephen Moyer and Mia Kirshner play their roles solid and in the last part of the movie really convincingly. The kids, well, Allie MacDonald seems to stay a TV series actress for good reason, I hoped for more but it seems beyond here capability. DeCunha plays Danny Boy like on drugs, don't know what to expect here in the future.So, the Devil story was silly and the movie will disappoint horror and thriller fans alike. Camera was quite good in some parts, the rest was constructed to uncaring that I wouldn't actually recommend this movie to anyone.

Hoping to reconnect together, an estranged family on a camping trip in the Pine Barrens learn the local legend involving the Jersey Devil is real when the voracious creature appears and forces the family to deal with it to escape the woods.This here is one of the more frustrating and problematic creature features around as there was a chance to do something special here. The setting here is a dark, creepy forest ripe with really terrifying layouts that are perfect for unleashing a voracious creature, it's quite a decent-looking creature with quite a chilling back-story to begin with, and there's some fun to be had when it gets the family lost in the back-part of the woods along the later half, but instead this one tends to involve a slew of increasingly bizarre and outright unnecessary subplots that make this one seem to go on forever. Adding in the usual family drama is more than enough and never really adds much new material to be influenced by this tactic, which feels like a continuation of the clichés anyway, yet the fact that there's so much extra happening going on here that the beginning to this one is so hard to get into it seems to go on forever dealing with the family issues, teen angst, the dead dog and the quest for closure about his father just makes for a tough time overall. All these subplots simply cause the actual attacks to get pushed back so much that the fun attacks in that second half come so late their inclusion is almost an afterthought and a case for being too little, too late to save this one from the potential it could've had about chasing down the revelers in the forest and them getting caught in the middle the way this starts off as, but even without this plot the beast itself and the action in the final half when he's mad and delirious do make this one somewhat interesting and save it somewhat.Rated R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence and children-in-jeopardy.