Redwood Massacre - Annihilation

This is a standard lower budget horror movie. It is not a comedy unless you consider a mediocre plot to be comedy. There are corny parts through out the movie and some medium level scary parts. It had potential, but it just sort of missed the mark. If you have 90 minutes and you feel like a lower budget horror movie, try it out.

No pun intended and maybe the trifecta (word) that is missing from the title. The movie and sequel itself is anything but a destruction. Actually as you can see with my rating I kind of think this is well done. Considering people say that the older you get, the grumpier you get ... maybe I am not there yet. Bare with me - and this slasher movie.

I don't even remember the other movie - which is quite obvious considering the low score I gave it. This one however has way better actors in it, I would argue from the trailer I rewatched from the first, it looks way better too. And the effects are probably a bit more .. at least refined.

You get quite the bloody affair here (again sorry for the pun), but it works in favor of the movie. Unless you have issues and are faint of heart ... probably shouldn't be watching this anyway. The ending is a bit ... well lukewarm I think is what people would call it, but other than that, this works its charm ...

So, I guess the high ratings is just because people like Danielle Harris? Me too, in Hatchet and the Halloweens. In this, not so much. Really the script was the issue. The burlap killer looks fantastic. Has a horror franchise look to him. I never saw the original Redwood movie, but we learn the 'team' in this one is haunted by the death of Harris' sister and the others killed so the father and a team of others have been looking for the killer and answers since. Ok, that's fine. Then, thud. For the life of me, can't understand how Harris's character is the 'leader' of the team hunting this killer. She's five feet tall and her only 'qualifications' we see is she does some boxing at the local gym and acts like she's tough. That's all you need, huh? Yet, everyone defers to her like she's the second coming of the Terminator, including her own father, and including some sort of combat vet with a giant bag of weapons who's easily twice her age. WTF? There's suspension of belief required in horror films, but this one was way over the line. Just makes the rest of the movie not work and neither does the fact that all the characters just don't act the way someone normal would based on the situation or what happens just before, whether that's something a person said or an event happens. The team drags along creepy superfan type guy who likes the dads book on the murders and pretty much spends the whole movie holding up a sign that says 'sketchy bad guy who will do something bad really soon'. They decide to investigate a military compound because it's 'one place they didn't search yet' because the dad was caught trespassing there in the past and got 10 days in jail. This is important, because they come up to the fence and the compound and he says something like 'I don't know exactly where it is, don't remember it looking like this, etc.'. Yet, that's the compound. YOU WERE THERE BEFORE AND GOT ARRESTED THERE! Seriously? Who wrote those lines? Lol. Anyway, do they send giant guy with a bajillion guns down into the underground compound to search it and maybe run into the killer who massacred bunches of people? No, five foot tall Harris and a flashlight, BY HERSELF, goes down because she said she was going down alone in a tough voice and ordered the others to stay up. LOL. Wow. Won't ruin the ending but will just say it veers into campy silliness that actually manages to top the poor script writing up to that point. Really too bad the characters were entirely unbelievable and the script was so poor, because the burlap killer really is the best looking potential horror villain I've seen in a long time. Two stars for burlap.

Several years after the original massacre, a novelist chronicling the original events brings a team together to search for the survivors in the same woods and find themselves lost at a deserted bunker underground holding a berserk rampaging killer created by a military experiment and must get out alive.

This is a pretty decent follow-up effort. One of the better aspects here is the rather strong tie-in that manages to connect the two entries, bridging the events together rather nicely for a pretty cohesive story. From the story of the missing persons from the past, including the characters from the original and trying to look into what happened at that spot in the woods to get the backstory for who everyone in the team is with the trek through the woods getting to the house, this one leads to a pretty impressive setup here. That leads to the other fun part of the film, which is the stalking and slashing. With their discovery in the underground bunker and all the different objects found within here, the unsettling nature of the bunker comes alive quite well with the darkened nature of the building and the growing realization that they've stumbled onto something bigger than they were led to believe. This brings them nicely into the killer's hands with some fantastic kill scenes with the chained-up and tortured victims or out stalking the group throughout the bunker where he finds them. With the action providing some nice brawling and confrontations resulting in plenty of graphic deaths plus the single smartest move to pull off in a genre effort, there's a lot to like here overall. There are some issues to be had here. The first issue to be had is the somewhat overlong build-up that goes through some excruciating character scenes with the team coming together. Featuring the team at odds with the new guy because he's an unknown to their tight-knit friends and all the hiking getting to the spot in the woods they need to be at comes off rather overlong and unnecessary with as much as shown. With the suspenseful yet uneventful explorations of the bunker once they arrive furthering that storyline, the killer doesn't even arrive on-screen until the hour mark which leaves all the usual trappings in a slasher film off-screen for vast majorities of the running time leading to a somewhat bland experience. The other real problem to be had here is the series of twists and turns that take this away from what the series had been in the first installment. That was a simple story of a group of people encountering a local legend about a deranged killer in the middle of the woods and was relenting stalking and killing people one-by-one, which is the complete opposite of this one. We're introduced to military experimentations and underground secrets that come off like an entirely different scenario altogether with the series of revelations given in here which may or may not be appreciated by all. These issues are what drag this one down.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

This film is a big improvement on "The Redwood Massacre", but a heavy cold is a big improvement on influenza; most people would rather have neither. Although it may be considered a sequel or perhaps more accurately a follow-up, it has little in common with the first film apart from the setting. And there was no actual necrophilia in the original. Yes, there are some realistic if depraved special effects; the plot is extremely implausible as our group of ill-fated adventurers are lured or lure themselves to what is thought to be an abandoned RAF base but turns out to be something very different.

The final scene is a contradiction, reverting from horror to what some might consider comedy horror. The big question is, will it make you laugh or cry?