Barricade

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.

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.

Just another lame film about a family of cannibals taking on a group of 'normals.' What is with the fascination with cannibals? And why are the cannibals, usually inbred morons, able to outwit people whose brains actually work? And why, do they always eat the nubile women who could give them unmutated children? If they are inbred morons, how can they understand weapons and such? This is just another one for the junk pile, along with silly films like the entire Wrong Turn series. Just another excuse for torture porn like the terrible Hostel films. Unless one is a total cannibal fan, skip this and save 125 minutes of your life. By the way, the directing, acting and sfx are fairly bad.

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.

Barricade is part of the "German ultra-gore",a complete genre on its own. Back in the 80s, Schnaass, Ittembach and Buttgereit were the founders of this "genre" and now Timo Rose is here to bring a good update on the genre, with more production values and better cinematography but with the same amount of insane violence and blood. Barricade is basically a "torture movie", people captured and mutilated. Not really a big plot, but very good gore FX is what you can expect from this one. I enjoyed it but it lacks in the plot department, and some "camp" moments would help also. I still have Zombie Doom and Premutos in the top of the German ultra gore genre, but Barricade,is near, also. Good photography(but i didn't like the "8 mm picture" FX and the MTV-style editing that were there quite a lot), good FX and lots of gore and blood. 7/10, recommended for the gore-hounds