A Hard Place

Wife and I were scrolling through TUBI to see if any new indie films dropped and saw this. Poster was great but for the story itself.....

A group of criminals on the run get caught up in a feud between creatures of nature and a family of hicks. That's it. That's all there is. No real dive into the backstory of the fued. The film begins with the criminals watching a movie at a drive in and honestly, I would have enjoyed watching that film instead, in fact, mid way through it makes an appearance again as they sit and watch it on tv and I was like, sweet. Then out of nowhere some weird sex education film shows up and I stared at the tv like a zombie. Speaking of which, can we go back to that film?

Usually I list all the characters and the actors who portray them but that would take two paragraphs. Good lord there's a lot of characters in this film, so much so at one point I turned to my wife and asked, "who's that again?" for which she replied, "I have no f****** idea." With so many there's no room to get to know many of them which leads to the obvious that they were there only to be fodder cause they were basically planks of wood. Felissa Rose is the only stand out with her performance as Henrietta. Usually she appears for five minutes or so in an indie film before vanishing or getting killed off so it was great to see her flex her acting muscle in a significant role which she chews up like a pack of gum. There's Lynn Lowry, who I adore, and Bai Ling, whose only appearance is in the drive in movie.

The screenplay written by J. Horton and James Epstein is average at its best. The creature effects, created by Robert Bravo, were fantastic, though some creature suits were better than others and the gore is impressive, especially in the drive in movie. Ah yes, the drive in movie. I might go back and watch those parts again.

While the concept is ingenious, it's somewhat wasted on a story that is flat and meanders from one scene to the next and filled with characters who are paper thin and you really don't care about.

5/10.

Anyone rating this movie beyond 3 stars, and I say that with generosity, either is related to the film production crew, or high as a freakin' kite. The intro is jarring but I felt a sense of relief when it was revealed to be a movie within a movie. I thought, "Oh, good, that was comically bad to give way to the actual movie." I was wrong. I'd rather watch a full feature from the intro, but only because what followed was truly awful. I genuinely enjoy well made B-horror movies. This was far from one of them, with cringey acting (by an unnecessarily enormous amount of characters) and a weak storyline. Fans of Felissa Rose should just rewatch Sleepaway Camp.

I very rarely take time to review a movie. As the only other honest reviewer said, everyone in the cast must have rated this stinker 8+ I generally like a good B movie, or campy one..not this one. Sorry to be a downer.

Cinematography and location are good. The dialog & actors are cheesy. The premise is ok, just no one can salvage it.

Gory enough...if you can stomach the very poor dialogue. Watch the preview...if you like what you see, by all means, watch it..if not, time to move on to something with a bit more polish and class. This one just does not check many good boxes.

If it's meant to be bad, they succeeded...

This was a mid movie. A lot of bland parts, mixed with some fun parts. That's only minus 2 stars. Minus 3 more stars though because you can always tell when a bunch of halfwit northerners made a movie. Their idea of how deep mountain Southerners speak is so blatantly off it's astounding. Yankees really are the worst sometimes.

"A Hard Place" is utter garbage. It's even worse than those cheap & cheesy "The Asylum" movies you see on the SyFy channel. Fake reviews claim bs like "It's Amazing & "It never felt Cheap" when all it is is cheap and definitely not amazing. I could go on but you get the point. This is a crap B- rated indie film that was probably done as a school film project. I was surprised to see Bai-Ling in this but then again even the fallen need a paycheck every now and then. Anyway, you can find better indie content on youtube that look and feel much better than this crappola. Watch at your own risk...you've been warned. LOL.