On the road to success, a Southern rock band self-destructing instead of reaching their peak decide to take a last-ditch writing session at a remote cabin in the woods to save themselves, but the more they stay and fight with each other they realize the cause is a demonic entity looking for a debt repayment and must get away alive.
This was a pretty decent and enjoyable effort. Among it's better elements is the way this one ties into the established history of rock-n-roll to play into an expected and cliche storyline. Realizing that the groups' destined to suffer the same fate as the legendary figures in the music scene just through the opening scrawl tend to offer plenty of advance notice of what they're heading towards while the best part of the film is the strong turns this takes to pay that setup off. Seeing their backstage antics and self-destructive attitudes on-stage as this all lead into the motivation to get to the cabin where everything goes down with the proper excessive behavioral motivation that comes up later to offer up the payoff to the earlier introduction of the rock curse. As well, that repayment of the rock curse comes to form in the film's rather enjoyable stalking scenes. The triple-encounter in the woods to start that off is quite enjoyable and unexpected, while the highlight encounter of the band-member who gets stoned and attacks a groupie who he thinks is a demonic figure trying to attack him is a stand-out sequence through the trippy filters and inability to separate his drug-fueled psychosis or reality as it flashes back-and-forth between both options. As these scenes tend to throw the identity of the harvester into question rather nicely before the reveal at the end which is a nice surprise and haves plenty of action about, there's a lot to like here. Combined with the fine nudity, there's enough to hold this one up although there are some issues with this one. Some of it's biggest issues lie in the overly bland and drawn-out pacing that takes far too long to get enjoyable as there's not a whole lot of interesting action taking place. Seeing the band go through their self-destructive phase to get the point of the curse activated for them, such as the in-fighting, terrible performances where they get outshined by local talent or decision to keep to themselves and their groupies instead of working together to save their career are cliched, boring and uninteresting. It's all part of the expected aspects that go along with these kinds of films and doesn't change much at all throughout here as they're all petty, sarcastic self-centered jerks to each other at the end which somewhat begs the question of why they got together in the first place. The last problematic factor is the decidedly obvious and anachronistic qualities present here that take this one out of the old-school tone and feel that should've been present here. Way too much of the lingo and slang here read too much like modern-day sayings, while the inclusions of pop-culture references to explain jokes and inferences is a much more modern tactic and tend to take the viewer out of the film quite easily. These overall hold this one back.
Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language, Nudity, Graphic Violence, several sex scenes and drug use.
