By Geno McGahee
I’ve seen a lot of stills from this movie for a while and it looked pretty interesting. It didn’t look original, but that was the appeal. They were throwing it back to the 1980’s brand of slasher and that really intrigued me. A guy with a mask and a weapon killing campers is always worth a watch and THE REDWOOD MASSACRE proved to be an interesting film overall.
Written and Directed by David Ryan Keith, THE REDWOOD MASSACRE revolves around a killer in the woods and a local legend. We are traveling into FRIDAY THE 13TH territory here. The killer was a deranged farmer that killed and ate his wife and then did the same thing to his children before killing himself. When a group of campers travel into the woods to stay for the weekend, they begin to feel the truth about the legend.
The campers set up camp and soon the story is told about the killer farmer. Jessica (Rebecca Wilkie), Mark (Adam Coutts), Pamela (Lisa Cameron), Bruce (Mark Wood), Kirsty (Lisa Livingstone) begin to have the normal getaway but soon the campers to begin to disappear and fall to the evil hands of the monster with a blade. Pamela goes on her own to find her friends, but stumbles upon a man with a mission. The man has lost his daughter and has set out to kill the bag-headed killer to avenge the murder of his kid.
After some gory deaths, Pamela takes on the bag head in a vicious battle. She gets away but her nightmare isn’t over. Salvation doesn’t come easy and she is soon thrown back into the lion’s den with a killer and she has to have one last fight to survive if she can.
THE REDWOOD MASSACRE is heavily inspired by FRIDAY THE 13TH and has some TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE mixed in as well. The killer is almost scarecrow-ish in appearance and pulls off the invincible killer quite well. I liked Lisa Cameron in the lead role. She did a great job as the counter to the bag-headed killer.
The film lives and dies with the gore and the visuals. There really isn’t much to the story or the screenplay. The film relies on the blood and presence of the killer. To the credit of the filmmakers, they did a spectacular job of presenting the blood, guts, and killer. The unfortunate thing is that they did not develop the story and didn’t pay a lot of attention to the story that would have possibly made this a movie to really stand out. Now it remains a good watch, but nothing special. The elements were there for something memorable but it seems the focus wasn’t there totally and the end result suffered. I recommend it but I’m slightly disappointed.
Rating: 5.5/10
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