Load of rubbish!!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

The nefarious Broderick family hold various drifters, hobos, and migrants captive at their slave ranch in Texas. Writer/director Glen Stephens relates the absorbing story at a steady pace, does an ace job of creating and sustaining a powerfully bleak atmosphere of utter hopelessness and depravity, makes fine use of the desolate backwoods locations, and develops a considerable amount of nerve-wracking tension. The sturdy and credible acting from an excellent cast rates as another substantial asset, with especially praiseworthy work by Jason Connery as tough and troubled war veteran Trevor Lloyd, C. Thomas Howell as the evil and slippery Clayton Connelly, Mark Holten as the dim-witted Weldon Broderick, Michael Madsen as the shady J.T. Goldman, Deneen Frazier as the ruthless Lois Broderick, Randy Spelling as browbeaten foreman Parker Hilton, Lin Shaye as the no-nonsense Mrs. Broderick, Robert Carradine as the mean Thad Simmons, and, in a regrettably minor part, Dennis Hopper as the amiable Sheriff Green. The jolting moments of sadistic violence and torture pack a seriously harsh punch while the redneck clan are a truly scary and brutal bunch. The fact that the plot is inspired by actual events adds an extra unsettling edge to the already upsetting proceedings. John-Paul Beeghly's glossy cinematography gives the picture an impressive polished look. Evan Evans' rattling score hits the shuddery spot. Worth a watch.

Hoboken Hollow is set in west Texas where three vagrant hitchhiker types, Andrew (Kingsly Marin), Howie (Rudolf Martin) & Archie (Erick Brubaker) have all been picked up by & offered work by a couple of guys named Clayton (C. Thomas Howell) & Junior (Jonathan Fraser) who run a ranch out in the sticks called Hoboken Hollow, unfortunately for the three hitchhikers they soon wish they had been left at the side of the road as working at Hoboken Hollow is quite literally torture. Owned by the Broderick family life at Hoboken Hollow is tough, you are forced to work all day, you barely get any food, you don't get paid, you get treated like dirt & if you try to escape you end up in pieces hanging from meat hooks. However ex-soldier Trevor Lloyd (Jason Connery) has other ideas...Written, co-produced & directed by Glen Stephens I have mixed feelings about Hoboken Hollow, I sort of liked it & hated it in equal measure. The script starts off extremely promisingly in an isolated way out in the sticks The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977 -2006) & Wrong Turn (2003) sort of way as it sets the story up. Unfortunately while I was hoping for a slick, nasty atmospheric gore filled slasher by the mid way point of Hoboken Hollow I thought I was watching a prison drama as the story settles down & focuses on the trials & tribulations of the workers rather than the activity of the homicidal Broderick's, I'm all for a good story but this goes off the rails so to speak & once it had settled down I started to find myself becoming bored & a bit disinterested. Having said that it's still a decent little horror/thriller with some nice exploitation, some rape & a fair bit of torture although the final twist is as obvious as they come & I'm not convinced the guys kept there would have been so co-operative, I mean why didn't they just take the chainsaw they had been given to chop wood & use it against their captors, torturers & eventually murderers? I know I would have at least tried to get away & a good old fashion chainsaw would have made for a decent weapon, right? I'm confident I would have been able to convince my captors to hand over the keys to the pick-up truck with the aid of a trusty chainsaw.Director Stephens does a fine job, Hoboken Hollow is surprisingly well shot & has that isolated, baking hot Texan outback feel to it. The family & their house reminds of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre although Hoboken Hollow is more graphic & doesn't go for atmosphere or scares as much. The gore is OK, there's a severed arm, a severed foot fed to the pigs, someones leg is repeatedly stabbed, someone is impaled on a large spike & there's some torture where people are hanged, electrocuted & peed on. I think this is one of those films where you think you see more than you actually do.With a supposed budget of about $1,100,000 Hoboken Hollow is very well made with impressive production values & it actually looks like a proper film, the special effects are decent & there's a surprisingly good cast here including Sean Connery's son Jason! I wonder if his dad's seen Hoboken Hollow because if he has I'd be more than interested to know what he thinks of it! Michael Madsen, the great Dennis Hopper, Robert Carradine & Michelle's sister Dedee Pfeiffer who I haven't seen since her role in Vamp (1986)!Hoboken Hollow is OK overall but I thought it had both good & bad points, unfortunately the bad points are pretty crucial to how I feel about it. It's an OK watch but I'd be hard pushed to recommend it to anyone.

Contains spoilers (but that doesn't really matter) After reading a couple of the more favourable reviews on IMDb I decided to rent this movie. What a mistake. What a baaaaad mistake.It starts with Jason Connery's character travelling across America 'to find his smile.... after seeing his best friend killed in Iraq', or so the extremely bad voice over tells us. Then the action quickly jumps over to Hoboken Hollow via a new captive in the back of a van stating "I've heard of Hoboken, my Ma used to say 'Like a bat out of Hoboken" (pffff), and starts to unveil it's selection of completely unbelievable and unscary freaks.We've got a foreman (Howell) who is trying his best to create a creepy ranch owner but only succeeds in creating a character only Jim Carrey would be proud of. A female 'brains of the operation' who's only slightly scary feature is her acne. A token 'freak' who's weapon of choice is an extremely low powered cattle prod that merely irritates people whenever he tickles them with it and a token 'mentally challenged but psychotic' son who carries out most of the butchery. Oh, and another character who I will mention in more detail later later.And so it starts.Now what these people tend to do is go on a drive every morning and pick up a few of the vast selection of conveniently placed hitchhikers that are on offer just waiting on the only road in the town, offer them a job on their ranch and proceed to torture and kill them if they don't work hard enough. Well I say torture but what I mean is poke them with the aforementioned 'Fisher Price' cattle prod.There is another sub-plot also running alongside this main story, that of Maddsen's character trying to buy up some land a random shop is placed on (I assume this shop is on the ranch but this is never really explained), it's only obvious connection is that the shop sells the human jerky produced from the ranch. (This human jerky is only $15 a packet - hardly worth the effort really), and that the mother of the 'psycho son' runs.So they've got all these folks stripping cedar (for sale at $50 for a lorry load), and becoming human jerky (for sale at $15 a pack) and everyone's happy until Maddsen makes Howell an offer of $25,000 to grass the others up for their inhumane acts (instead of grassing them up himself?).The 'psycho son' overhears this and kills Howells, and we find out he's not as stupid or mentally challenged as he had everyone believe (WOW WHAT A (random and meaningless) TWIST!) and that 'acne girl' is not the brains of the operation it's 'psycho son's' Mum who is (ANOTHER (random and meaningless) SHOCKING TWIST).And then Connery escapes from the ranch and finds his smile. WTF!!!!! Now, all the above could maybe be just about fine but one character really brings this story into the realms of absolute crapness. This character is a worker that has been on the farm for so long that he's become one of the family. The trouble is that this character is soooo inconsistent that it just becomes laughable, at times the story plays on his emotional battle between right and wrong but can't decide exactly where his real emotion lies, one minute he's laughing like a madman when they capture 'new employees', then gets back to the ranch and can't stomach what he's just done, then laughs like a madman when the family are torturing (tickling) one of the workers, then has a breakdown when he gets back to his room, all in the poorest, most unbelievable way imaginable, whilst his 100% normal everyday , non freak girlfriend weeps at their predicament (after getting raped that afternoon but doesn't tell him).It was extremely hard to put together a cohesive 'outline' to this story due to it's absolute crapness, and in a way I want to say go and watch this film just to see what I'm getting at! But I wont.The victims in this film would have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they just traversed the waist high (that's right waist high) fence keeping them in walked off down the road in the middle of the night.

This film is very documentary . It takes you out of your comfort zone and drops you in the middle of hell. The film places the audience in the lives of people that were actually tortured. I know a lot of people go to see movies for an escape, some go to be entertained, some go for fun. Not to forget those few of us that go to a film to see a bit of truth that is brought by an artistic point of view. This film left me with the most gut wrenching feeling that I've ever had. I felt such sadness for the poor victims that actually went through this torturous experience. I really admire the film makes that went out on a limb to make his film. I"m sure they knew ahead of time that viewers would give them grief that they didn't put ten half naked models running around screaming with their hands in the air. I'm sure some viewers were upset when a guy didn't jump out from behind the door and say boo... To wrap this up, if you are an intelligent person and want to see what an actual horror film is all about, then this picture is right up your alley. It's probably the only film I've seen where I was actually scared for the victims. Strong content so be warned.