Bill (Mike Lenzini) thinks it's a great idea to spend a few days
camping with his best buddies (T.J. Lavin, Blake Farris, Darren Flores,
Eric Waltzer) ... totally forgetting that Ely (T.J. Lavin) and Mike (Blake
Farris), once the best friends, can't stand each other's guts of late. And
indeed, even on the way to their totally remote camping spot (nobody
around for miles, no internet or cellphone connection, the whole shebang)
the two are at each other's throats, and ultimately during their first
dinner together, Mike, a psychological klutz for whom to be the alpha
animal means everything, has upset Ely to such an extent that Ely walks
off into the woods. Bill goes after him ... and is found dead a little
while afterwards, murdered, while Ely seems to have vanished from the face
of the earth. Now Mike, who quickly makes himself the leader of the
others, immediately blames Ely, but fails to come up with any proper
solutions once they need to decide what to do ... and thus they lose their
way in the woods, arrive at another campside, where Mike almost gets into
a totally unprovoked and unnecessary fight with that site's campers
(Brandon Feranda, Christopher Styles, Tara Lynn, Ravyn Jade), and when all
decide to stick together to get throught the thick of it, it's mostly Mike
who drives the group apart and have the other site's campers killed, one
(Tara Lynn) pretty much directly. Thing is, there is a reason why Mike
is terribly afraid Ely might do him harm (quite apart from what has
happened to Bill and the other campers), as he might be to blame for Ely's
sister's suicide - and when he finally confesses, that breaks up the
group, and alone in the woods is not a good thing if an insane killer's
after you ... but is it really Ely who's after them? What might
sound like nothing but your typical slasher in writing is actually a
pretty good movie: Instead of focussing on the murders (which almost all
happen off-screen) and presenting us with cannonfodder characters with
cookie-cutter characteristics and an easy-to-identify survivor, we are
treated to a story that thrives on suspense, presents the audience with
several original twists and turns (including the final scene), and with
characters that are given room to develop rather than walking clichées.
And add to this a very cool scenery and decidedly unexcited yet fitting
camerawork, and you've got yourself a pretty good piece of genre cinema. Recommended.
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