Barricade

Wow, after trashing the disk of Timo Roses "Rout City" after about 15 Minutes (South Park is about more than meaningless cursing... I guess some people just don't get it) I was interested in this movie. I read quite some positive stuff and the packaging and look of the movie seemed far from the total trash I expected after "Rout city".

Surprise: The movie isn't total trash but the problem seems to be exactly that. Timo Rose tries to walk in the footsteps of German Horror/Splatter Cinema like Olaf Ittenbach and the likes. That means "Barricade" is in parts extremely gory and detailed. The gore FX are not really believable but OK, the acting is OK but in some cases plain sucks. The hillbilly chick in the opening sequence is ridiculous and doesn't get better till she's shot.

So what is the problem... the movie is gory, has a typical German underground vibe (including the classic booby shots in blood), OK FX and a modern feel to it like the packaging already promised?!

1. The script is total BS. You get a typical hillbilly/lost in the woods story with some guys+gal camping out and meeting a degenerated hillbilly family. Everything is just leading towards the torture/mutilation scenes and seems unbelievably random and pointless. This is the first thing that makes "Barricade" half-hearted.

2. Random is also the perfect description for a lot of the camera work (I liked the repetitive cut to the tweezers in the extended booby torture scene... either they had no material or the editor works in a hardware store). Even worse the editing... sure, its modern and far better than a lot of other movies in the genre but its RANDOM. You got an overuse of that typical exposure effect everywhere and with no meaning ... its just there... all the time. Then there's some grainy/noisy film look which also is just thrown in here and there for the sake of it, I don't get the meaning.

3. Like the fore-mentioned effects there is a lot of repetitive stuff in here. For example most of the kills are edited with multiple repetitions of stabbing and punching. Its OK once but here its annoying and fake, especially towards the end. Annoying also attributes the "music" which is permanently used without any change in the background. It doesn't take long until it makes the movie hardly bearable.

4. From all this comes the biggest problem of this movie (and many others in my opinion). If you make a splatter movie with trashy feel its pretty idiotic to polish it with special FX and new school editing. It looks like they take it way too serious. Its no fun because the decent gore FX are plain wasted in this context. And where the classic gore FX are OK the computer FX in scenes like the stabbing in the mouth or the gunshots in the ending look rather silly(and 3D splatter mostly sucks to me even in movies with a budget and decent 3D artists).

I often wondered if the time of serious splatter movies is over and "Barricade" is just another example it might be time to put it in the tomb. Its no fun, has no character and is too trashy for its look. The script is a cheap try on "Wrong Turn" and "TCM" leading absolutely nowhere. You can take that literally... the ending is just there and as random as many other things here ("I love you" in a splatter flick... come on!!). "Barricade" tries to incorporate a lot and fails...you can sure fast-forward through this movie for some extensive disembowelment, acid face melting,nipple pinching and classic Friday the 13th style stabbing of a couple while fingering in a tent (bloody boobies hooray!). But its really hard to get through this. Total failure especially because you can see it could have been something.

I am a big horror movies fan and I followed this movie for a while on myspace. I like German splatter movies and I was excited about this one. I never saw any of Timo Rose's movies before. When i saw it, I was not surprised at all. It is like most German splat movies but with more gore than most of them. I thought it was really cool.

Some friends go into the woods and get attacked by cannibals. It is not an original plot but it is fun in this movie. Germany looks really pretty and the editing is cool. It is definitely better than most direct-to-DVD stuff that gets made anymore.

I would recommend this movie to any gore fans out there. Even though the acting is not great, it is better than most z-movies. It is great for some friends to sit down and watch with some beer. You will laugh at the cheesiness and gag at the gore.

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

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.

This movie should never have been made. The acting was horrible the plot the same. Why cant there be 1 person out there that can act in a low budget movie. You will have a better viewing experience if you watch any of the Wrong Turn movies. True there is some good gore scenes in it ,but nothing nothing that hasn't already been done before.The camera work is so confusing that it almost gave me seizure just watching it,it is hard to understand at times what is actually going on.It is really upsetting that all the male characters can't really fight back,and the only one with any backbone is this useless female(main character).This one should be avoided at all costs.