I really liked this little movie and lot, yet it's so low budget it's hard not to rip into it a bit. Let's start with the good points: It's bloody! If you like movies like Hostel, Wrong Turn, etc. Devil's Grove is going to be right up your alley. At its core, it's is a low budget version of those kinds of films. But the filmmakers go so far over the top with the torture and murder, it makes you shake your head and laugh. The more you watch, the more the painful deaths just keep on coming. Plot: A psycho redneck named Jimmy works and lives at an amusement park. He's also diddling the 16 year old daughter of the amusement park's owner. When dad catches them in the act, he freaks out, punches Jimmy in the face and fires him on the spot. The next day Jimmy is caught back on the property, but he doesn't seem to remember anything about the girl or know why his boss is physically throwing him off the property. In fact, today Jimmy seems dim witted and confused about everything and is caught scratching the eyeballs out of the models in old porn mags. Also, the entire time the boss is throwing Jimmy off the property his incredibly foxy daughter is begging the father to leave him alone and how the guy never touched her. Confusing? Doesn't really matter, cuz on the third day, when the owner arrives to open the park, he finds every member of his family run business slaughtered!! And I mean, drugged, tortured, gutted, murdered, and then placed in poses on the rides all over the park. It's one of the coolest sequences in the film. They show each murder; some in flashback and some in real time, but it's a five to six minute montage of enough carnage to fill an entire Fulci film. A television reporter tells us that "Jimmy" was arrested and convicted of the crimes, but sentenced to a mental facility.... And all that is just the opening 10 mins of the film.
Now flash forward ten years and a bunch of pin headed high school seniors are all about to fall short of graduating and are all given a second chance by passing a group communications project. Hottie Carrisa (Susie Silva) is given the job of deciding what that project will be. She decides on a short student documentary about the murders at the local Denville Grove Amusement Park from ten years earlier. A very bad move, because as soon as the group shows up at the now defunct and abandon amusement park...the murders start back up! So now, one by one, we get to see all the cookie cutter teens (The Nerd, the jock, the slut, cheerleader, etc.) get beaten, tortured, gutted, chopped up, etc, etc, etc. There's a few twists in the plot, some cool, (one really caught me by surprise) some confusing, some dumb as hell, but in the end I had a great time with Devil's Grove.
