Talon Falls

After reading some bad reviews, I have to say it wasn't that bad. It was quite decent for a low budget production.

Heading out for a road-trip together, a group of friends out for a camping trip get detoured to a local amusement park along the way, where they are captured by the organizers of the carnival and kept to be used as unwitting and unnoticed victims in the event, forcing them to try to escape the group.

For the most part, this one was a solid enough effort. The initial start here comes from them arriving at the funhouse attraction in the amusement park which is rather fun and chilling. Starting off with the usual carnival attractions as they tour the maze filled with ghouls and deformities popping out of the darkness to scare people, messing with the lights going out constantly and featuring plenty of blaring noises constantly around them, there's some cheesy fun with the setup that allows for their shock at the scenes of the kidnapped victims they see being tortured along the way which they don't realize are real people being tortured. The nature of it is effective and gives this a strong introduction to the later scenes inside the park. Once they get kidnapped and held captive, there's a strong sense of brutality that comes about here due to the torture that's inflicted. The scenes of them being held down in the steel cages with the guard dog and then taken out to be put on display in the carnival attraction adds a wholly disturbing tension to the scenes as they try to wait out a plan of action to move forward and escape. The plan is a logical enough endeavor with the general idea of distraction and ambush providing this with plenty of action and logical enough twists to showcase the organization to be right there on their tails and delivering several solid and outright thrilling scenes of them chasing each other through the back-alleys of the carnival. With some great gore as well, these here make for a lot to like here. There are several big flaws with this one. One of the main issues is the fact that the entire operation makes no sense how it's operating as long as it has been going through victims the way they are. The idea here is that every one of the shows they put on within the community has been done with the group torturing and killing victims they've grabbed along the way from the pile of corpses left in the woods nearby which makes no sense how they've dumped bodies in the area with little regard to their discovery. That also dives into the cliched nature of the film as there are so many scenes and setups that emerge here taking its cues from other efforts that it diminishes the suspense heavily, especially the ending twist which doesn't come off as any kind of shocking action at all. These here are what hold this one down.

Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

It starts out like a typical horny-teens-take-a-road-trip-to-a-backwater-town horror flick and initially I only stuck around because the guy playing Lance is a hottie but it actually turned out to be a pretty decent movie. What also helps is its relatively short running time of less than an hour and a quarter. The acting is typical of this genre but that's not necessarily a distraction.

This was a solid, if not unremarkable, crazy backwoods people horror movie. I liked the set, which I understand is a real haunted house attraction in Kentucky. The setting had a lot of great atmosphere. I also liked the choice of music that played a significant role in the story.

Where I think this movie struggles in the acting by the leads and the story. The two main actresses don't do much more than scream throughout most of the story. Neither really does much to make her character different or memorable. In fact, the screaming was so annoying by the time we arrived at the climax of the story, that I did not feel bad for their disposition. The supportive acting wasn't so much acting as walking and swinging an axe. The bad guys had no development whatsoever.

This leads to the bigger issue - the story. It borrows heavily from the "House of 1000 Corpses" which itself borrowed from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and other slasher movies. The scheme is so complex that it makes the puzzles in "Saw" seem practical. If you think about why this haunted house exists or how it can sustain itself or how the killers could have video tapes of victims going back for years without anyone figuring this out, the story falls apart.

I watched the whole movie and it was kind of fun, but it is dumb as a box of hammers.

Some of the scenes were cool... but I couldn't get over the severe lack of imagination for story. EXTREMELY FLAT!! The haunt was cool, the idea was OK... but the beginning SCREAMED "House of 1000 rip off".

I met the guy at the gas station the other night. Someone even asked "Is there something wrong with that guy?" Kept asking us if we wanted our picture with him. I'm sure he may be a nice guy, but he was annoying Sunday night.

I rated a 3 / 10 and I was feeling generous. Much of the acting was bad... even for a low budget horror film. But the idea of the torture setup etc was pretty neat. We finished the film but we won't be adding it to our shelf.