Oddly Skullish Masks: The Redwood Massacre (2015)

The Redwood Massacre (United Kingdom, 2015)
Rating: **
Starring: Mark Wood, Lisa Cameron, Lisa Livingstone

Strangely, while I found nothing admirable from this film apart from successfully wasting an hour and a half of my day, I also cannot dismiss this movie. Why is that?

The story is nothing new; five campers decided to hang out in the woods for the usual bonding experience, only there appears to be some sort of love triangle within the three that leads to absolutely nothing. Why? Because there's a burlap sack-wearing killer out in the forest killing people for...the sake of killing people . (Not much is really given to what motivates this maniac save for a campfire tale about a farmer who'd gone bonkers and murdered-cannibalized his family with an axe.)

The totality of the film then follows the remaining campers (a bitchy girlfriend and a dull-looking good girl) walking through the woods to find their friends, all the while one of said friends escapes and tries to evade his killer, getting other people murdered along the way. Sad thing about this shindig was that it's barely exciting and the resulting scares and killings were dull, repetitive and overdone.

Each kill was done away with a gratuitous blood splashes and stock sound clips, but they lack any real creativity that a good slasher film should possess. While I normally do not mind repeated use of the same murder weapon or method of said murder, the only time I feel this way for a horror film is when the story was engaging and, sadly, this film failed to establish any likable or strong characters to begin with. They just let the maniac show his oddly molded burlap-sacked face and start massacring them, barely handing us enough time to establish ourselves in their situation.

Still, I admire the effort made to make these killings as shocking as possible; The Redwood Massacre was a chore to watch as sack-head goes Hostel on us and toys with some his victims before ending their lives, but I can tell the people behind this film wanted more. The problem with this was that the execution of these scenes needed work; the killer's body language was a little confused, some scenes are prolonged for the sake of padding and the victims react to their demise very oddly.

With no twist in the end or any shock value that works, the film is simply about campers trying to survive a night in the woods and at barnyard, which also happen to be the hunting ground of our psycho. The Redwood Massacre is passable as a low-budget splatterfest that's really just in it for the grue and nothing much, but if you're the kind of sick camper who's into this, give this one a try.

Bodycount:
1 female knifed on the gut, hacked to death with an axe
1 female killed offscreen
1 male hacked to death with an axe
1 female hacked with an axe, disemboweled
1 girl beheaded with an axe
1 boy hacked to death with an axe
1 female knifed to death
1 male had his forehead sawed open with a hacksaw

1 male seen dead

1 female hacked to death with an axe
1 female stabbed with a saw, disemboweled
1 male stabbed to death with a saw

7 males and 4 female seen dead

1 male punched through the gut
1 male had his throat slashed with a saw
1 male crushed with falling cars
Total: 26