Redwood Massacre - Annihilation

Yes it's a typical horror, but if you love gore and little suspenseful jumpy parts then this is great. The effects were good, the mask the butcher wears is awesome, the acting was fine (not great but Gus was spectacular) It's definitely worth the watch for people who like gory slashers.

No pun intended and maybe the trifecta (word) that is missing from the title. The movie and sequel itself is anything but a destruction. Actually as you can see with my rating I kind of think this is well done. Considering people say that the older you get, the grumpier you get ... maybe I am not there yet. Bare with me - and this slasher movie.

I don't even remember the other movie - which is quite obvious considering the low score I gave it. This one however has way better actors in it, I would argue from the trailer I rewatched from the first, it looks way better too. And the effects are probably a bit more .. at least refined.

You get quite the bloody affair here (again sorry for the pun), but it works in favor of the movie. Unless you have issues and are faint of heart ... probably shouldn't be watching this anyway. The ending is a bit ... well lukewarm I think is what people would call it, but other than that, this works its charm ...

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.

So, we're in Scotland investigating a Scottish serial killer. But everyone is American. One fella seems to only speak in marine movie clichés, one man looks like my hipster barber, one lass seems to make up the numbers and then we have the lead female who works as exposition for the poorly conceived and executed narrative.

Slow, ponderous and, if possible, even poorer than the first film. Although we at least got some brief sense that these characters had actually met each other before, unlike the first movie.

The only gleaming light in this movie is that my hipster barber seems a fairly decent actor. Why I have to supplement him with expensive beard trims and hair care, I'll never know.