Barricade

It is always hard to find any gore flicks that really have a story to tell or have real actors. I immediately became aware that this one was made with great love and with a real budget. The editing is great, performances are good and the gore is convincing. The storyline is of course a typical one, don't go in the woods. It reminded me more towards Wrong Turn then The Hills Have Eyes. Wereas The Hills have deformed people here we only have predators like in Wrong Turn. The movie never slows down. From the start it really gets you going with the gory slaughtering of some Germans, I noticed some friends of Timo that I met a few years ago at a convention. What's really well done is the editing that really made the gore look like it's real and not the gore that makes you laugh. A nice movie even if you aren't a gore freak.

Personally I can't comprehend why, but the infamous and horribly untalented splatter directors from Germany – Andreas Schnaas, Olaf Ittenbach and Jörg Buttgereit – somehow dispose of a large fan base and apparently they even built school! Timo Rose, for instance, is clearly an avid follower of Schnaas with an equally grotesque obsession for nauseating gore, but he's sadly also equally amateurish and blundering. "Barricade" is as good as unwatchable, with extremely poor camera- work and editing. There isn't anything that even remotely resembles a plot and whenever there isn't any gore and bloodshed on display, the film is dreadfully boring. Actually, the film is dreadfully boring even when there is gore and bloodshed on display. The dumb and uninspired story shamelessly imitates great genre classics, such as "The Hills have Eyes", and revolves on a cannibalistic family living in Germany's Black Forest and feasting on backpackers and idiotic passers-by. The cast members are presumably just Timo Rose's drinking buddies and they can't properly articulate, whether it's in English or German. Since the release of "Barricade", our director already saw his childhood dreams come true – probably – because he co-directed the third sequel in Andreas Schnaas' atrocious "Violent S***" franchise.

I was not completely blown away by Barricade but I thought it was definitely a fun, gore-filled movie. I just read a negative review and it was obviously written by someone who does not watch or appreciate no budget movies. This movie is not Hostel. It is not The Hills Have Eyes. It looks like they shot it for a few thousand dollars. But there is nothing wrong with that - as long as you know that is what you're getting.

The acting is stiff at times and the plot is rather thin, but the real reason anyone should be watching this movie is for the amazing, nasty gore. Much like Andreas Schnaas' Violent Sh*t movies or Olaf Ittenbach's Premutos, the goal here is to show as much splatter as humanly possible on a shoestring budget... and in this regard, I think Barricade's filmmakers and FX artists definitely succeed.

Timo Rose is a talented director and I look forward to seeing more of his movies in the future. I hope he continues getting releases outside of Germany. This is the first movie I have seen of his in Spain. Although his editing sometimes went a little over-the-top in Barricade, it hints at an untapped talent that a larger budget might be able to bring forth.

Also, I was not a fan of the hip hop music in the movie. It was good music - but it did not fit the scenes very well. The other music was all very good, though.

All together, I'd definitely recommend this movie to anyone who wanted to see a lot of gore done of a tiny budget. If you like big budget Hollywood horror films or you need a strong plot, then don't bother. But if you're like me, you'll have a really good time with it.

7 out of 10

A group of friends come face-to-face with a family of hideous cannibals whilst camping in the beautiful German countryside.

The 'mutant cannibal family' concept is almost as old as the hills that the inbred freaks often call home, so any director attempting to breath new life into the genre needs to come up with something pretty darn special in order to impress. With Barricade, Timo Rose tries to give the well-worn routine a Teutonic twist, by transplanting the action to The Black Forest and giving it the German low-budget splatter treatment. The result is a very bloody, but totally unoriginal effort that is made almost unwatchable thanks to some dreadful directorial decisions—in particular, the non-stop use of fancy filters and irritating editing techniques.

Had Timo Rose not opted to utilise every naff trick his editing software offered him, then Barricade might have been a reasonably entertaining gore-fest: his inexperienced cast do reasonably well; the bloody effects are suitably stomach churning; and there are one or two scares and even some well conceived creepy moments. All of this, however, is completely ruined by the awful camera-work, choppy editing, and overwhelming barrage of visual gimmickry used to give the film the distressed look that is so inexplicably popular with today's film-makers.

I give Barricade 3 out of 10 purely for the outlandish gore, which includes a nifty scene where a guy is forced to drink acid, loads of nasty wounds caused by a variety of sharp implements, and some pretty decent shotgun damage.

Wow, after trashing the disk of Timo Roses "Rout City" after about 15 Minutes (South Park is about more than meaningless cursing... I guess some people just don't get it) I was interested in this movie. I read quite some positive stuff and the packaging and look of the movie seemed far from the total trash I expected after "Rout city".

Surprise: The movie isn't total trash but the problem seems to be exactly that. Timo Rose tries to walk in the footsteps of German Horror/Splatter Cinema like Olaf Ittenbach and the likes. That means "Barricade" is in parts extremely gory and detailed. The gore FX are not really believable but OK, the acting is OK but in some cases plain sucks. The hillbilly chick in the opening sequence is ridiculous and doesn't get better till she's shot.

So what is the problem... the movie is gory, has a typical German underground vibe (including the classic booby shots in blood), OK FX and a modern feel to it like the packaging already promised?!

1. The script is total BS. You get a typical hillbilly/lost in the woods story with some guys+gal camping out and meeting a degenerated hillbilly family. Everything is just leading towards the torture/mutilation scenes and seems unbelievably random and pointless. This is the first thing that makes "Barricade" half-hearted.

2. Random is also the perfect description for a lot of the camera work (I liked the repetitive cut to the tweezers in the extended booby torture scene... either they had no material or the editor works in a hardware store). Even worse the editing... sure, its modern and far better than a lot of other movies in the genre but its RANDOM. You got an overuse of that typical exposure effect everywhere and with no meaning ... its just there... all the time. Then there's some grainy/noisy film look which also is just thrown in here and there for the sake of it, I don't get the meaning.

3. Like the fore-mentioned effects there is a lot of repetitive stuff in here. For example most of the kills are edited with multiple repetitions of stabbing and punching. Its OK once but here its annoying and fake, especially towards the end. Annoying also attributes the "music" which is permanently used without any change in the background. It doesn't take long until it makes the movie hardly bearable.

4. From all this comes the biggest problem of this movie (and many others in my opinion). If you make a splatter movie with trashy feel its pretty idiotic to polish it with special FX and new school editing. It looks like they take it way too serious. Its no fun because the decent gore FX are plain wasted in this context. And where the classic gore FX are OK the computer FX in scenes like the stabbing in the mouth or the gunshots in the ending look rather silly(and 3D splatter mostly sucks to me even in movies with a budget and decent 3D artists).

I often wondered if the time of serious splatter movies is over and "Barricade" is just another example it might be time to put it in the tomb. Its no fun, has no character and is too trashy for its look. The script is a cheap try on "Wrong Turn" and "TCM" leading absolutely nowhere. You can take that literally... the ending is just there and as random as many other things here ("I love you" in a splatter flick... come on!!). "Barricade" tries to incorporate a lot and fails...you can sure fast-forward through this movie for some extensive disembowelment, acid face melting,nipple pinching and classic Friday the 13th style stabbing of a couple while fingering in a tent (bloody boobies hooray!). But its really hard to get through this. Total failure especially because you can see it could have been something.