Redwood Massacre: Annihilation

No pun intended and maybe the trifecta (word) that is missing from the title. The movie and sequel itself is anything but a destruction. Actually as you can see with my rating I kind of think this is well done. Considering people say that the older you get, the grumpier you get ... maybe I am not there yet. Bare with me - and this slasher movie. I don't even remember the other movie - which is quite obvious considering the low score I gave it. This one however has way better actors in it, I would argue from the trailer I rewatched from the first, it looks way better too. And the effects are probably a bit more .. at least refined. You get quite the bloody affair here (again sorry for the pun), but it works in favor of the movie. Unless you have issues and are faint of heart ... probably shouldn't be watching this anyway. The ending is a bit ... well lukewarm I think is what people would call it, but other than that, this works its charm ...

I'm sure I'll be the only 10 on here, you can chalk it up to low expectations if you like, after the dismal, one-note abortion that was The Redwood Massacre. The second I saw Danielle Harris' name, I thought "credibility bit part." I was wrong. She is an asset to this film, has a starring role, and it was a thing of beauty to see her beat the crap out of Max. I can't say things started well. More of the same carried over from the first movie. And that is, pointless pain and suffering with no context, though it does introduce Max. Who the hell is/was Max? This movie not only keeps you guessing, but I don't think the question is ever answered. Especially in the way he is just disposed of. Is he a superfan? A serial killer groupie? A copycat killer? Redwood's henchman? An actual manufactured/trained Redwood Killer?! (One thing we do learn, in an amusing scene, is he is a necrophiliac!). Redwood Massacre: Annihilation improves on virtually every aspect of movie making that the first movie failed so miserably at. Shockingly, this sequel (released 6 years after the debut) was made by the same guy! Writer/director, and if you watch the credits, jack-of-all-trades David Ryan Keith. Full marks to that guy, even for just being extra ambitious. I saw improvements in acting, direction, production value, cinematography, character development, score, you name it. This runs nearly an hour and three-quarters, and not all that is devoted to gruesome kills (though there are some good ones here). Annihilation is purposefully paced. As in, they allow you the time to get uncomfortable, linger, and effectively build tension. THEN you get your head chopped off. I even saw a few trope reversals! There's an element of intrigue, especially the more they explore and discover what the hell is going on at the underground military bunker (or is it?). I, for one, LOVED this ending. Reminded me of George Romero. The very end left room for a sequel, which generally annoys me, but they also left several questions unanswered. So, bring on another one!

This movie is such a vargathe. The first one was itself a garbage and still they decided to make a second one, first movie shows the majeed evil guy as someone who got influenced by some evil entity and this movie show its some experiment, what on earth was the director thinking. The first itself is acheap remake of friday the 13th with haloween bgm, and this is well awfully made in much worse way. The actors are terrible you will actually be happy that the female lead and her entire family killed along with her team. One thing i dont understand is the first movie takes place in europe somewhere in scotland or england everyone speaks british english,this movies starts there the landscape and all but the place just like that moves into america and everyone has american accent.

So, I guess the high ratings is just because people like Danielle Harris? Me too, in Hatchet and the Halloweens. In this, not so much. Really the script was the issue. The burlap killer looks fantastic. Has a horror franchise look to him. I never saw the original Redwood movie, but we learn the 'team' in this one is haunted by the death of Harris' sister and the others killed so the father and a team of others have been looking for the killer and answers since. Ok, that's fine. Then, thud. For the life of me, can't understand how Harris's character is the 'leader' of the team hunting this killer. She's five feet tall and her only 'qualifications' we see is she does some boxing at the local gym and acts like she's tough. That's all you need, huh? Yet, everyone defers to her like she's the second coming of the Terminator, including her own father, and including some sort of combat vet with a giant bag of weapons who's easily twice her age. WTF? There's suspension of belief required in horror films, but this one was way over the line. Just makes the rest of the movie not work and neither does the fact that all the characters just don't act the way someone normal would based on the situation or what happens just before, whether that's something a person said or an event happens. The team drags along creepy superfan type guy who likes the dads book on the murders and pretty much spends the whole movie holding up a sign that says 'sketchy bad guy who will do something bad really soon'. They decide to investigate a military compound because it's 'one place they didn't search yet' because the dad was caught trespassing there in the past and got 10 days in jail. This is important, because they come up to the fence and the compound and he says something like 'I don't know exactly where it is, don't remember it looking like this, etc.'. Yet, that's the compound. YOU WERE THERE BEFORE AND GOT ARRESTED THERE! Seriously? Who wrote those lines? Lol. Anyway, do they send giant guy with a bajillion guns down into the underground compound to search it and maybe run into the killer who massacred bunches of people? No, five foot tall Harris and a flashlight, BY HERSELF, goes down because she said she was going down alone in a tough voice and ordered the others to stay up. LOL. Wow. Won't ruin the ending but will just say it veers into campy silliness that actually manages to top the poor script writing up to that point. Really too bad the characters were entirely unbelievable and the script was so poor, because the burlap killer really is the best looking potential horror villain I've seen in a long time. Two stars for burlap.

I am very surprised this movie got a sequel but I will say I loved that they used a character from the movie prior in the beginning. Now it's pretty obvious that this is better then the first one; It's produced better, it's darker, the story was more interesting but still not that good and ended up creating more questions that were never answered, but they set themselves up perfectly for another movie so hopefully those questions get answered. Now something odd they did was change the origin story of the killer and even mentioned other attempts at making other killers. With the origin story changed they gave room for fan interpretations which is always fun; Mine is that the legend of the farmer was a planted cover up to mask the project and killers they created.

Well......this was slightly better at 2stars than the redwood massacre. The story was so bizarre n did not fit in with the slasher context. It was a mind-boggling stupid weak story but there was plenty of gore n blood. There was little to none tension n no suspense or much action to speak of. The acting was atrocious n the characters were unbelievably dim. The ending was bizarre n diabolical. I only recommend this movie if you like mindless dumb horror flicks with lots of fake blood.

So, we're in Scotland investigating a Scottish serial killer. But everyone is American. One fella seems to only speak in marine movie clichés, one man looks like my hipster barber, one lass seems to make up the numbers and then we have the lead female who works as exposition for the poorly conceived and executed narrative. Slow, ponderous and, if possible, even poorer than the first film. Although we at least got some brief sense that these characters had actually met each other before, unlike the first movie. The only gleaming light in this movie is that my hipster barber seems a fairly decent actor. Why I have to supplement him with expensive beard trims and hair care, I'll never know.

I really enjoyed this movie. It had all of the gory blood and action. Danielle Harris was superb. Along with her co actor, but I must say that I did not like the ending at all. I am a huge fan of Danielle Harris and the character actors that she plays, but, the ending was the waste of a perfectly good movie. I would have given the movie a 10 if the ending was right.. Killing the main character really sucked...

Several years after the original massacre, a novelist chronicling the original events brings a team together to search for the survivors in the same woods and find themselves lost at a deserted bunker underground holding a berserk rampaging killer created by a military experiment and must get out alive. This is a pretty decent follow-up effort. One of the better aspects here is the rather strong tie-in that manages to connect the two entries, bridging the events together rather nicely for a pretty cohesive story. From the story of the missing persons from the past, including the characters from the original and trying to look into what happened at that spot in the woods to get the backstory for who everyone in the team is with the trek through the woods getting to the house, this one leads to a pretty impressive setup here. That leads to the other fun part of the film, which is the stalking and slashing. With their discovery in the underground bunker and all the different objects found within here, the unsettling nature of the bunker comes alive quite well with the darkened nature of the building and the growing realization that they've stumbled onto something bigger than they were led to believe. This brings them nicely into the killer's hands with some fantastic kill scenes with the chained-up and tortured victims or out stalking the group throughout the bunker where he finds them. With the action providing some nice brawling and confrontations resulting in plenty of graphic deaths plus the single smartest move to pull off in a genre effort, there's a lot to like here overall. There are some issues to be had here. The first issue to be had is the somewhat overlong build-up that goes through some excruciating character scenes with the team coming together. Featuring the team at odds with the new guy because he's an unknown to their tight-knit friends and all the hiking getting to the spot in the woods they need to be at comes off rather overlong and unnecessary with as much as shown. With the suspenseful yet uneventful explorations of the bunker once they arrive furthering that storyline, the killer doesn't even arrive on-screen until the hour mark which leaves all the usual trappings in a slasher film off-screen for vast majorities of the running time leading to a somewhat bland experience. The other real problem to be had here is the series of twists and turns that take this away from what the series had been in the first installment. That was a simple story of a group of people encountering a local legend about a deranged killer in the middle of the woods and was relenting stalking and killing people one-by-one, which is the complete opposite of this one. We're introduced to military experimentations and underground secrets that come off like an entirely different scenario altogether with the series of revelations given in here which may or may not be appreciated by all. These issues are what drag this one down. Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

The sequel to 2014's The Redwood Massacre finds writer/director David Ryan Keith (Ghosts of Darkness, The Dark Within) returning to the titular Redwood Farm, a place where the owner went insane before killing his family and himself. Now, a stranger has brought together several family members to prove whether or not the burlap-masked killer was real or just an urban legend. Of course, as things often happen in these movies, the killer is very much real and turns the tables on those looking for him. Where the film makes a real jump for originality is by adding in a conspiracy element, as the hunters find a place where serial killers are born and bred. Then, they're trapped there and forced to battle perhaps more than one maniac (the death of the first movie's final girl at the hands of someone other than The Burlap Killer will give you a clue). The filmmakers were also smart enough to cast Danielle Harris (Halloween 4, Halloween 5, Hatchet II, Hatchet 3) as one of the leads. I like the idea of a heavily armed group trying to get payback on a killing machine and this surely delivers on the concept.