Word was this year was even more dismal than the two previous. I’ve actively avoided bothering with any of the other movies, but Mal got this one for free from the video store, and we gave it a shot. Seems they once again managed to find at least one diamond in the rough. Well, it’s less a diamond than it is one of those shiny, semi-crystalline rocks you occasionally get in a load of gravel, but it doesn’t suck. Such is the sad state of contemporary horror that, “well, it doesn’t suck” sounds like a ringing endorsement.

We’re in familiar territory as Nina, her boyfriend Matt, his buddy Jack, and Jack’s girlfriend Rebecca head into the wilds of Tasmania to look for evidence of the supposedly extinct Tasmanian tiger still living in remote parts of the forest. Nina’s motivation is twofold, as her sister disappeared in the area looking for the tiger some time before. They set up base in a small shantytown called Sarah before setting off into the wilderness. Unfortunately for them, this area was settled by descendants of Alexander Pearce, the “Pieman”. Pearce was a notorious criminal and suspected cannibal who escaped into Tasmania for a time before being captured and hung for his crimes in 1824. And guess what? The inhabitants of Sarah honor their founding father by upholding his cannibalistic legacy. The problem with that is, they don’t get fresh blood into the gene pool too often, and some of the locals are far less…normal than the rest.

You can pretty much fill in the blanks from there, can’t you? You’ve seen this movie a hundred times. It’s a little bit Make Them Die Slowly, and a little bit The Hills Have Eyes. It’s every backwoods cannibal movie ever made. There aren’t a whole lot of new wrinkles you can introduce into that formula. The day I find a movie that does manage to reinvent one of my favorite exploitation subgenres in a way that impresses and excites me, I’ll be a happy Norse Apocalypse. Until then, I’ll just have to be happy that people can continue to make them without screwing them up too badly.

As these things go, this is a fine example. It’s gory, it’s extremely and unrepentantly mean-spirited, and it has easily one of the creepiest and most fucked-up hillbilly cannibal monsters I’ve ever seen. So why am I not as excited about it as I probably should be? It’s a problem that has been discussed here and elsewhere a million times, and the true source of it may never be pinpointed. The best I can come up with is, like most contemporary horror/exploitation movies, it’s too clean. It’s too sharp. It isn’t fucking sleazy enough. Despite being obviously shot on digital video, it doesn’t look like a home video. It’s very clear and professional-looking. Unfortunately, clear and professional-looking is a detriment when you’re trying to make your audience feel like they need a shower.

Having digital-crisp picture quality when you’re trying to convey a sense of dark, gritty horror saps all the character out of your movie. The threat is removed, and instead of feeling like you’re really looking at the last known footage of some poor, unfortunate bastards who stumbled into something that got the better of them, you just feel like you’re watching a movie. It may be a perfectly serviceable movie, but it just doesn’t feel as real.

I kind of wish the tiger angle had been played a bit more, too. The cannibal hillbilly dude should have had a pack of deformed monster tigers as pets. Hey, if you’re gonna go for it, you may as well go all out.

I didn’t hate it, I wasn’t overly impressed by it, it was just kind of there. It has no real reason to exist, but neither do most of the movies we watch around here. Sadly, the glory days of this genre are already behind it, and if you’re really hankerin’ for a hunk o’ cheese, or grimy blood and guts as the case may be, you’re better off revisiting one of the classics than watching the same old tropes trotted out in a shiny new package.