Satan's Playground

It seemed like a stereotypical dysfunctional family, presumably Italian-American, on a trip through the woods in New Jersey. They break down and, like the back roads of Texas, they come upon things they should have left alone.

Felissa Rose seemed more like the daughter than the wife, but I'll play along. If Frank (Salvatore Paul Piro) can get a wife like that, there is hope for me.

Major screams from Felissa Rose, putting her at the head of the class as a Scream Queen.

Creepy, bloody, suspenseful fun makes for a good scary pic with some very weird characters.

I am tired of wasting my time with pathetic horror. The worst acting you've ever seen, and you immediately hope all of the main characters die soon.The movie had just started when you get the "Did you hear that?" line. Oh my God...I have finally realized that there is no American horror any more. The production value is castrated by amateurish acting. American horror needs something other than "a band of crazies out in the wilderness terrorizing a family." The emphasis on the Home Depot "scary" door knocker is totally laughable. The only redeeming factor is a trailer for Evil Dead, which is a much better film.I stopped this one fast and sailed it across the room.

With SATAN'S PLAYGROUND, Director Dante Tomaselli takes the bleak nightmare world of his last effort, HORROR, and fuses it with a more linear story line. It's a supernatural monster movie with a crazy, demonic twist. Within its kitchen sink of terrors are the legendary Jersey Devil, a lunatic family, and human sacrifice.

1980's cult horror icons Ellen Sandweiss and Felissa Rose play sisters Paula and Donna, who, along with Paula's baby and Donna's husband and autistic son, find themselves up against the aforementioned dangers. Also along for the ride is Edwin Neal, who pretty much reprises his bat$h!t role from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

Tomaselli makes use of the Pine Barrens, swooping his camera around a la EVIL DEAD. People seem to either hate this movie utterly, or see it as a masterpiece. In reality, it's somewhere in between these extremes, deserving none of the hyperbole of either side. Still, it is worth seeing...

I consider myself a fan of Mr. Dante as a writer and director. I enjoyed both desecration and Horror. Did they have good acting? Not really. Were they scary? Desecration had some creepy parts, but overall no. So why did I like these movies? because they were surreal. They were on crack and they knew it. This is what made the movies enjoyable to watch. Satan's playground is much more straight forward and this leaves all of Dante's bad dialogue and bad actors nowhere to hide. The movie isn't scary. There is only one really moment of gore. This movie is just plain bad. The married couple in the film look like father and daughter and I thought they were for the first half hour.

A family in New Jersey drives along an isolated road, and the father is falling asleep at the wheel. His wife (I thought at first she was his daughter) mainly bitches at him, and he falls asleep two or three times since nobody has the sense to replace him behind the wheel. Their station wagon gets stuck in mud alongside a road. They're unable to push it out and don't try to put anything under the wheels for traction. The father walks into the woods to find help for some reason, rather than walking down the road. He comes across a boarded- up house and asks for a phone.

What seems like like hours later, the wife (Felissa Rose) goes off in the woods in the same direction. Somehow she winds up at the same house, and asks for the phone. While she had earlier said that her son was foaming at the mouth in the back seat of the car because he was scared and not because of a seizure, at the house she says her autistic eighteen- year-old son was having a seizure. She also says that her husband has seen a house in the woods - he hadn't. The old woman at the house mentions she has thirteen children, two of them living at home, both of them in their forties and retarded.

A cop stops by the house. He says there had been some kids dressed up in Halloween costumes outside. He hears Felissa calling for help in the basement, but accepts the old woman's explanation that it's a stray cat. Dumb! He returns to his car, an old beater with a blue light on top. He gets attacked by something from the sky, and these minor injuries apparently kill him. Despite the death of a police officer, later in the movie they send out just one officer and one of the victims to check the house!

Back at the car, the sister sees the cop's car parked in front of the station wagon. Why didn't he check the station wagon before going to the house? How did he see the people outside the house when it was far in the woods? How did he return to his car so quickly? This is a movie with lots of writing and continuity problems.

Sis leaves her baby in the car when she checks the police car, and naturally it's gone when she returns. She goes into the woods, also manages to come across the same house, and asks to use the phone. She freaks out there, and scares a teenage girl who stopped by the house to use the phone. Surprising the old lady's palm reading business wasn't more popular at such a popular location!

The autistic son had gone into the woods also and knocked himself out. He too goes to the house, and eventually gets sucked into the ground, like a character in Tomaselli's Desecration, which is more interesting than this movie!

And on it goes. Much of the musical score is quite poor, particularly the instrumental song that is apparently supposed to be playing on the radio. The acting is just execrable, almost all-around. I couldn't say whether this was the casting or the direction of the actors. Ellen Sandweiss is OK, and attractive, but has a small role. There are horror clichés aplenty, like one character finding it easier to jump out what is apparently a third story window, than trying to break through a thin first-story door with a large window in it. The ending is pathetic, a steal from Evil Dead that I suppose is meant as a tribute, but just feels cheap.

Avoid!