At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Timber Falls starts as loving couple Mike Warren (Josh Randall) & Cheryl James (Brianna Brown) arrive at Lake Kumbrabow State Park near West Virginia to go hiking for a couple a days, local Park rangers advise them to stick to patrolled paths but Mike & Sheryl decide to hike to Timber Falls after a woman named Ida (Beth Broderick) says the scenery is better. Mike & Sheryl set up camp & the following morning Mike wakes up to find Sheryl has disappeared, after being caught in a bear trap Mike is rescued by Ida & she tends to his wounds at her house. Worried for Sheryl Mike insists that Ida call for help but she doesn't & Mike becomes suspicious, Mike discovers that Ida is being held by a deformed freak in Ida's basement & that Ida & her husband Clyde (Nick Searcy) have a twisted plan for Mike & Sheryl...Co-written & directed by Tony Giglio this backwoods brutality horror thriller is watchable enough for it's type but it's not something that I would call great, a mixture of classic films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) & Wrong Turn (2003) without really adding anything new or particularly memorable. The script is strictly routine in everything it does, the two big city civilized victims who take a wrong turn & make some bad decisions after which they end up at the mercy of inbred & or deformed Redneck or Hillbilly psycho's who torture them & abuse them for the remained of the film until they manage to turn the tables although here in Timber falls there's an awful twist ending in which the deformed mutant ends up at Mike & Sheryl's house over a year after he was supposedly killed. The body count is fairly low, a woman jumps to death off a cliff during the opening sequence but then no-one gets killed until the last fifteen minutes & as such Timber Falls often doesn't feel like a ten slasher but that's exactly what it is only without the large body-count. There are some glaring moments of stupidity too, why does Sheryl wait so long to admit she's already pregnant? Given the choice between being brutally tortured & having sex with your girlfriend most people would surely choose to have sex? So why then does Mike refuse & let himself & Sheryl be tortured for so long? It just doesn't sit well with me. The psycho's here are religious nuts & once again the whole idea of these deeply religious people torturing & killing people just seems contradictory, the deformed psycho Deacon is never more than an inferior Leatherface rip-off which his arsenal of rusty blades. knives & weapons. Then there's the infamous head scratching scene in which after being threatened & robbed by three Hillbillies the couple actually carry on hiking & Sheryl amazingly makes Mike throw all the bullets from his gun away.To it's credit Timber Falls is well made & a pretty glossy looking film, the photography & lighting are slick, there's no CGI computer crap just good old fashion make-up effects & there's a definite backwoods feel although it's maybe a little bright at times. The gore levels are alright but maybe because Mike & Sheryl are held captive for so long you think you see more than you actually do, a woman has long metal nails through her hands which she then rips out, a man is whipped, a little finger is cut off, people are beaten, a guy gets an axe in the head, someone is decapitated, people are shot, someone gets a knife in the neck & there's a fair amount of blood splatter too. Not the goriest film out there but still quite brutal at times I suppose.With a supposed budget of about $2,600,000 this was set in Virginia but actually filmed in Bucharest in Romania. The acting is alright, the two leads were cast for their looks while the two main psychos are pretty good.Timber Falls is a competent backwoods horror thriller that is well made, moves along at a decent pace & has a few nice torture scenes but a silly script that defies logic & common sense at times & a lack of originality prevent it from being anything more than merely watchable if there's nothing better to watch.

This film had me convinced on the quality right up to where the girlfriend bumps into a park ranger as she is escaping the pursuit of her disfigured attacker. It was this moment when it was revealed the ranger and attacker were connected that ruined the whole experience. The ranger character acted poorly and the scripting for this scene was totally mismanaged from the perspective of solid performances being felt throughout from the lead actors. Other than this there were no real surprises, although I did enjoy very much the toying with that the young couple got from the locals early on in the film. The final and most cliché aspect of the film involved the surviving couple (a year later) leaving their newborn to sleep whilst the blade of the attacker was seen outside the window. So, all in all I would say this film had a lot of potential but it felt like the director wanted to make some quick money and just have his name up in lights as it popped up immediately when the credits started, which by the way was so fast it was without any artistic direction or subtlety.

What is it about West Virginia? A young couple decides to go hiking in the mountains there, and end up being imprisoned by a deranged hillbilly clan looking to have a baby as their inbred nature has caused the woman in the group to miscarry numerous times. This STV takes its cues from WRONG TURN, Texas CHAINSAW and HILLS HAVE EYES. At best, it is a time killer. The special effects are nothing to write home about, and the bloodletting is kept to a minimum. There is one good torture scene. Better acting than one might have expected, too, from Nick Searcy as the clan's patriarch and Josh Randall as the hero. Both are familiar TV faces. Like so many of these films, it was shot in eastern Europe, although unlike the recent WRONG TURN 3, nothing about the film betrays this. Unless you count some over-the-top backwoods accents.

First and foremost I was'nt expecting a 'classic' by any means, and as a lifelong horror fan i left overt criticism behind a long time ago,but after watching 'timber falls'i felt compelled to write.This film's problem is'nt that it's Derivative -i could watch limitless variation's on the deliverance theme - more it's guilty of one of the worst sins (pardon the pun) of any film genre(the horror genre especially) and that is of being as dull as hell.If the script writers of this yawnathon injected anymore life into the dialogue it would be a barely twitching corpse,you have too wait over an hour for any near decent gore and when it comes it's all cgi'ed and sterile (imagine tom savini after a lobotomy given free reign with an apple mac) and the casting isn't great either the two main leads being remarkably wooden and even the hillbilly bullies looked and acted like'one tree hill' extra's who haven't shaved for a couple of days.Being a huge horror movie fan i often have to justify my love of this much mocked film genre to non horror fan friends,sadly with uninspired boreathons like 'timber falls',it's sadly all to easy to see where there coming from.