Redwood Massacre: Annihilation

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?

I am very surprised this movie got a sequel but I will say I loved that they used a character from the movie prior in the beginning.

Now it's pretty obvious that this is better then the first one; It's produced better, it's darker, the story was more interesting but still not that good and ended up creating more questions that were never answered, but they set themselves up perfectly for another movie so hopefully those questions get answered. Now something odd they did was change the origin story of the killer and even mentioned other attempts at making other killers. With the origin story changed they gave room for fan interpretations which is always fun; Mine is that the legend of the farmer was a planted cover up to mask the project and killers they created.

This is one of those movies where you have everything , the cast including Danielle Harris and all do a good job but sadly somewhere the script and a tight screenplay let them down. The director does a good job with creating some tension and atmosphere for a slasher, the make up and gore effects are excellent right through , but just something lacked here. I enjoyed the 2015 Redwood Massacre, this is not a direct sequel but has some connection to the previous movie. Don't go with the low ratings on IMDB, Watch it ,but you'll feel .. Oh this could've been much better.

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 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.