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Same old story: 5 college kids - Jeff (Joey Kern) with girlfriend
Marcy (Cerina Vincent), Paul (Rider Strong) with Karen (Jordan Ladd),
who he's secretly in love with & Bert (James DeBello) - go to
backwoods USA for a vacation, to spend a week in a remote cabin doing
what college kids do - having sex, drinking, smoking pot & shooting
squirrels. However, their idyll is soon disturbed by hermit Henry (Arie
Verveen), who seems to be terminally ill, with his skin rotting on his
living body. For some reason, instead of helping him, the kids violently
chase him away, crashing their own car while doing so (clever guys,
aren't they ?) & setting the man on fire. However soon they are
plagued by guilt, fear of being found out & the desperate need to
get away, but all the backwood-folks are acting pretty weird &
distrusting towards these urbanite college kids, including deputy
Winston (Giuseppe Andrews). Additional to all that mess, Karen soon
falls ill with the same disease as Henry, & our kids have no better
idea than to lock her away in a nearby shed. Now Bert is trying to fix
the car, but they are under constant attack by Henry's dog, & it
soon becomes apparent that Bert has taken ill too - & in the
fighting among the group that ensues drives off alone. Of course he soon
has aq lynchmob following him (after all, this is hillbilly country,
isn't it ?). The rest of the group soon drifts apart, too, with Jeff
taking off into the woods in order to get royally drunk, Marcy (Jeff's
girlfriend) suddenly having sex with Paul, before he heads off, too
& she is eaten up by Henry's dog. Paul meanwhile finds Henry's
corpse in the water reservoir (which will definitely help spreading the
disease) &, upon coming back, decides to kill Karen (?) with a
shovel to put her out of her misery. When later Bert returns, still on
the run from the lynchmob, Paul decides in helping him fight them - a
fight that costs Bert's life, but also the whole mob bites the dust. Later,
Paul, by now suffering from the disease as well, even manages to get to
a hospital, but the doctors cannot cure him but notice the disease to be
highly contagious, so they do the only decent (?) thing, handing him
over to the police, for deputy Winston to kill him. & Jeff, you
might ask. He did actually survive without being infected, and, when he
finds the corpses of his friends, becomes overtaken by ... euphoria (?),
only to in the end be shot by the police as well. But the disease
might never be over, since we see kids already selling homemade lemonade
made from the contaminated water ... Judging from the actions
of the characters this might have been an existentialist drama about the
inability to communicate in the modern world, judging from the
characters themselves ... this is just bad. No efforts were made to
give the characters any life at all, they are just the same cut-outs
used in so many other teenage horror-movies, only, they are a completely
unsympathetic hateable bunch. How can an audience even remotely care for
someone who has no better idea of treating a sick man than to set him on
fire ? Who locks away a close firend in a shed just because she is
sick ? Who even kills her with a shovel ? Now it might be, they are
doing all this only because they are infected, however, if that is so
(& I really don't know - or much care, for that matter), the
director put absolutely no effort into transmitting it to the audience.
Apart from the weak handling of the storyline, the movie is not much
more than a patchwork of genre stereotypes stolen from just about any
other movie remotely dealing with similar subjects, so no surprises
there. Definitely not worth a look ! |