There's something great about a very real, scary story in this age of preposterous, nerdy CGI fantasies. This is exhilarating, old-fashioned B-movie stuff that leaves you feeling satisfied.
The minute our hero, med-school student Chris (the cute Desmond Harrington), goes off-road to avoid a lengthy tailback you know he's driving, literally, down a dangerous (dirt) path.
Especially when he rounds a bend and crashes into a cute bunch of stoner kids who've bunked off work for some fun in the West Virginia woods.
C'mon! You know they're going to split up and go rambling through the redwoods, scrabbling to find help...
What they haven't counted on is the deformed, cackling Mountain Men who roam these parts.
These are bloodthirsty grotesque giants, with webbed hands and hairy lips, whose in-breeding has made them resistent to pain.
Harrington and Eliza Dushku (Faith from Buffy) make a convincing pairing, possessing the requisite furrowed horror movie brows.
The kids come to violent blows with the axe-wielding mutants, who are based on photographs of real people who do, incidently, exist in strange parts of the Appalachian hills.
Director Rob Schmidt and his scriptwriters have clearly taken Deliverance as their reference point, throwing in a few shades of The Hills Have Eyes.
This is good, solid scary stuff that had my heart racing to the fabulous finish. It's not art. But then that's not what you want some nights now, is it?
Aidan Conway
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