Main cast: Lisa Cameron (Pamela), Mark Wood (Bruce), Lisa Livingstone (Kirsty), Rebecca Wilkie (Jessica), Adam Coutts (Mark), Lee Hutcheon (The Hunter), and Benjamin Selway (The Redwood Killer)
Director: David Ryan Keith
The Redwood Massacre is a movie about an apparently invincible killer in the woods, but wait, there’s something original about it in a way. It’s British, so we go through the tropes with British accent sprinkled on!
We need a killer, so it’s the Redwood Killer. Legend has it he was a farmer that, after being possessed by a demon, brutally murdered his wife and daughter before offing himself.
Well, it’s now the 20th anniversary of that lovely day, so our cast of imbeciles decide to celebrate that momentous moment by spending a night at the Redwood House.
Kirsty, who hates everyone and everything, for some reason manages to win the affections of Mark. Mark intends to spend the night at that place with his friends, which include his ex Jessica, so Kirsty invites herself along while making sure that she won’t stop complaining and being an outright bitch to everyone.
I have a feeling that Kirsty is meant to be some endearing sarcastic bitch that tells it as it is, but my god, that character just comes off as unnecessarily hostile and even heartless.
Mind you, Jessica is just as annoying,
Also present are Pamela, Jessica’s good friend, and some guy called Bruce.
The gang spends the night waiting for Bruce, but he never shows up. Soon, Jessica and Mark are also grabbed, along with Bruce, by the Redwood Killer—yes, shocker, he’s alive—because he loves murdering the rear end out of imbeciles and collect their various body parts in jars. What a guy, saving the human gene pool from being polluted by garbage like these imbeciles!
The best thing about this movie is the gore. The Redwood Killer is like the guy from Hatchet, in that he loves to tear and dismember his victims, but unlike that movie, his victims here don’t tear apart easily like they were made of paper. This allows for some delicious and believable practical effects that allow for some glorious gut-ripping, skull-tearing, disembowelment goodness.
Unfortunately, that’s the only saving grace of this thing. For the most part, the main characters are either very obnoxious—Kirsty—or forgettable.
In fact, the final girl, which can be seen coming from a mile away because she’s the most inoffensive and bland of the lead female characters, seems to have just sort end up in that position because the killer has overlooked her. He probably finds her as forgettable as most people do.
Well, cheering for the deaths of these imbeciles could have been fun, but the second half of the movie completely goes off the rails in the worst way possible: it becomes freaking boring.
Some characters start wandering along empty roads while bickering, while others run around the killer’s home while making enough noise to alert even the dead. Occasionally the killer shows up, but it’s as if they had run out of budget for practical effects, so they had to stretch out the film as much as possible without having to include fun gory goop.
So yes, the second half of the movie is an interminable slog to watch, because the fun isn’t there and I’m subjected instead to imbeciles doing their best to annoy me out of my mind.
In the end, the movie doesn’t offer anything new to make up for its faults. The movie has this tired, weary by the numbers feel to the whole thing, from the predictable lack of cell phone signal in the woods to the killer in question wearing a mask and brandishing an ax.
Really, there is little here that hasn’t been done better in other slasher films of similar nature, and this movie doesn’t even pretend to some parody in order to justify its utter lack of originality.
Stay for the few scenes of gore, fast forward through everything else.
