Sendero

This blood fest survival movie was a waste of time unless you just like gore after gore with no plot to speak of. Nasty characters come and go throughout the budget scenes without explanation of who they are or why they are doing what they are doing. My torture was seeing it through to its confusing, pointless ending, par for the course.

A group of friends head out for a holiday in the country. There they are kidnapped by a weird, psychopathic family.

This was never going to be Citizen Kane. However, it had potential as an entertaining B-grade thriller. Unfortunately, even with such low expectations, it is still very poor.

For a lightweight thriller it moves very slowly and is far from thrilling. There's no engagement - you don't really care about the main characters. Dumb, dull plot that seems to go around in circles.

Avoid.

I'm reviewing this because no-one else has. The IMDb score is currently 3.6 which sounds horrendous – but it's not that bad. The acting is pretty decent and the sparse dialogue, seen as subtitles in my case, is fine. There's a rather dull opening few minutes which doesn't establish much we subsequently need to know or care about, but once the action starts it doesn't let up until the movie ends. Best of all, though this is fairly stock horror fodder, something about it feels slightly different and fresh – maybe just because it's Chilean.

What's not so good? Well it is stock horror and there's no real story. A bunch of people run into some psychos and get brutalised – that's pretty well it. There is some kind of sub-plot going on, but I never really understood it, nor the ending come to that. If you like this type of horror, relying on nasty sadism with people trying to survive and escape, rather than jump-out scares or explicit gore and splatter (the special effects aren't great – it's quite low-budget) then you may find this quite entertaining. The worst thing is that bane of the horror genre – people keep doing stupid things for no reason. Example: some good guys get the drop on some bad guys and make them drop their guns. They then run away without taking the guns, leaving the bad guys to pick them up, kill more people and chase them with them. This kind of thing happens over and over but I guess horror-fans can't be too bothered by it as it's the same in most movies in the genre.

Accepting a foreign-studies scholarship, a woman and her friends decide to take a road trip to celebrate the occasion but when they are caught by a deranged family of psychopaths interested in keeping them as pets for a ruthless criminal to play with as he pleases they try to gather the courage to escape the area alive.

On the whole, this was a pretty enjoyable effort. Among it's more noteworthy aspects is the strong setup that works nicely to get the group captured and caught since this occurs quite early on in the film. With the first sign of car trouble allowing the second instance to appear just as helpful and then turning it around immediately, there's a disorienting nature to the immediacy of them getting taken. The efficiency they accomplish it and have the group taken back to their house where they awake chained up or just held in various rooms of the dilapidated house where they have to confront the disturbed family in such a state is quite chilling with the way this sets everything in motion. Once trapped by the family, the film picks up considerably with its emphasis on the brutality and cruelty the family displays. Treating the butchery and carnage against not just them but the other remaining captives in their care as nothing out of the ordinary where they're free to sexually molest anyone they want when they want or play ruthless games of life-or-death with them adds a great amount of intrigue to what's about to happen to them. The psychological torment and toll this takes in their need to escape which has a lot to like as the scenes of realization that sink in once they realize the true nature of the games being played is quite enjoyable for how dark it goes. That said, there are a few minor issues with this one. One of the biggest problems is the strange relationship the group has while being captured, as they are clearly under the family's rule and torment but seem to have some liberties that they really shouldn't. The brothers can take the girls out of their rooms and walk with them along the property talking about the situation without any kind of fear displayed about being held captive, which is quite unrealistic and doesn't fit in with the type of storyline featured here. Rather than be ruthless and barbaric all the time towards which this shows they're capable of, these other scenes of humanity seem at odds with the rest of the film and stand out due to that. The other aspect to hold this back is a nonsensical and irritating finale that doesn't do this one any favors. The fact that they're able to get out of the area alive and free of their captors on several occasions only to get caught only through stupidity without being reprimanded to halt further attempts is ludicrous to think would play out in a normal scenario. On top of that, the confrontations with the mysterious stranger who has no bearing on the film until then, especially if all he does is stand around making threats without doing anything about it or explaining what's going on as the series of events on display are quite improbable and confusing to play out. It brings this down somewhat but not enough to fully knock this one out.

Rated Unrated/R: Extreme Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and sexual innuendo including the possibility of rape.

There is a lot to hate here, the Poor acting, the nonsensical motivation of the characters, the plot, etc.

However, it does give off a whiff of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I think there is a film to be made here with better execution.