Don't Go Near the Park

The people who put down this movie must be the kind of people who when they were children would make fun of the retarded kid on the school playground. Of course, this movie is a dumb. Of course, it is laughably inept. It's not "so bad it's good"--it's not a good movie in any sense of the word--but there is something likable about it. Living in a time when movies may as well be written by corporate marketing directors and edited by a Hollywood test audience, it's nice to see a movie that is completely ridiculous, technically proficient in some ways but nevertheless looking like it was shot in someone's backyard with primitive special effects, amateurish acting, and Mom no doubt providing the catering. It was obviously a labor of love if not exactly a labor of competent film-making.

The plot is something about 12,000 year old brother and sister witches who have survived by cannibalizing young children, but cannot actually become young unless they have a kid and then--oh, who cares? Anyway, the brother chooses a young Linnea Quigley to be the bearer of his child. A comment here on Quigley: this is the kind of role she was meant to play--she provides some nudity (full-frontal, full-dorsal, lingering breast shot)and then exits stage left. Her nude scenes certainly add to the movie, but they are not cynically expected to carry the whole movie as was the case in a lot of the roles she did after she became a "scream queen". And maybe she can't act, but at least she tried in the early days before she adopted her intentional "bad acting" schtick.

The lead though is not Quigley but her "daughter" played by one Tamara Taylor, who never appeared in another movie but is pretty memorable in this one. She faces off against her old crone aunt and protects some other children from her (with the help of the obviously drunk headliner Aldo Ray). She's not a great actress by any means, but she fits THIS movie perfectly. Just as this movie at times resembles a deranged children's fairy tale with it bizarre storyline of witches and endangered youngsters before it suddenly launches into some unconvincing but very graphic gore(which got it put on the "video nasty" list in Britain), Taylor seems like a young, innocent girl but also has surprising and disturbing scenes like where she ends up in a van being pretty graphically groped by a group of would-be rapists(including, ironically enough, the director). This is followed by the most unintentionally funny scene in the movie where a protective amulet she is wearing causes the van to run off the road and explode in a near-nuclear fireball.

Is all this meant as a recommendation? Well, maybe not. But you have to admire the fact that something like this was ever made in the first place. There's never been another movie like this--and there probably never will be again.

I read the warnings online. Despite them, I stupidly went out and rented this piece of garbage. Wow. I've been let-down by a movie before, but never by a movie I had no expectations for anyway. This was just bad. First of all, the intro takes place "12,000 years ago"... which would make the characters 10,000 years older than Christ, but they speak VERY good American English... wow. THAT'S an impressive feat, almost as impressive as going on a 12,000 year-long murdering spree and not being caught once. Another impressive feat would have to be the awesome special effects they used to show aging... which were the exact same effects used in The Wolf Man almost 40 years prior to this. Incredible. [sarcasm]

Yes folks, this movie includes it all: bad acting, stupid effects, weak plot, and best of all, two 12,000 year old murderers, everything. The only thing this movie has going for it, in my opinion, is that it's hard to find.

"Don't Go Near the Park" is one of the most bizarrely incompetent movies I have ever seen. I've watched it twice now, and still don't really know what it's about. There's something in there about cavemen being cursed to never die but continue to age. The only way the cavemen can stave off this awesome decrepitude is to eat the guts of children. They also hang out in a park, I think, which sort-of-explains the title. (?)

Other than that I can't really make head nor tail of this movie. There are a few scenes where people's guts are ripped open, however unconvincingly. Why do they just do it with their hands? Wouldn't it take incredible strength to rip through the stomach muscles to access the gut?

There is an attempted rape scene where a girl has her shirt ripped open and then makes a van crash.

Also Linnea Quigley shows up in one of her earliest roles. She shows her breast.

There's also a curly-haired kid, whose presence in the movie I didn't understand, and a guy named Cowboy.

Can anything be made of all this?

I'm not the asinine type of film viewer who needs everything to make sense. Some of my favourite movies make no sense and I love them for it. But "Don't Go Near the Park" has another fatal flaw: it's boring.

Our discomposed little comic-book horror tale begins in a cave thousands of years ago, as an old hag curses her evil son and daughter. Flash to modern times(okay, the late 70s...whatever), and the ancient siblings prowl the land looking for children to slaughter as a sinister means of self-preservation.

Performances are true-to-type crap, adding deepened injury to the already suffering DON'T GO NEAR THE PARK, a sloppy bottom feeder of a film which does manage to chalk-up a few lively moments(some pretty nasty gore, specifically), as well as a laughably overenthusiastic non-ending which leaves this lemon wide-open for a sequel you'd better believe you'll never live to see.

A failure, certainly, but a failure that a few may find endearing in a disowned hungry kitten sort of way. Female lead Tammy Taylor appeared in the amazing MALIBU HIGH the same year, and co-star Meeno Peluce later starred on TV's VOYAGERS with the ill-fated Jon-Erik Hexum.

4/10

If you are showering and a creepy man walks in on you and stares at you, instead of kicking him out and calling the cops, you should ask him if he needs a room to rent. Unfortunately, he'll probably end up marrying you so that you will bare his child and be the perfect mom so that he can sacrifice the kid as a virgin to stop a cannibal curse on himself and his sister which was placed 12,000 years ago. Or something. That's pretty much the plot of "Don't Go Near the Park." This is some of the worst writing in the genre. Dark Sky does a great job with packaging, as usual, but this is the first film they've re-released that is probably skippable, as it has little to no entertainment value.