Best movie of this year hands down!

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

A family in New Jersey drives along an isolated road, and the father is falling asleep at the wheel. His wife (I thought at first she was his daughter) mainly bitches at him, and he falls asleep two or three times since nobody has the sense to replace him behind the wheel. Their station wagon gets stuck in mud alongside a road. They're unable to push it out and don't try to put anything under the wheels for traction. The father walks into the woods to find help for some reason, rather than walking down the road. He comes across a boarded- up house and asks for a phone.What seems like like hours later, the wife (Felissa Rose) goes off in the woods in the same direction. Somehow she winds up at the same house, and asks for the phone. While she had earlier said that her son was foaming at the mouth in the back seat of the car because he was scared and not because of a seizure, at the house she says her autistic eighteen- year-old son was having a seizure. She also says that her husband has seen a house in the woods - he hadn't. The old woman at the house mentions she has thirteen children, two of them living at home, both of them in their forties and retarded.A cop stops by the house. He says there had been some kids dressed up in Halloween costumes outside. He hears Felissa calling for help in the basement, but accepts the old woman's explanation that it's a stray cat. Dumb! He returns to his car, an old beater with a blue light on top. He gets attacked by something from the sky, and these minor injuries apparently kill him. Despite the death of a police officer, later in the movie they send out just one officer and one of the victims to check the house!Back at the car, the sister sees the cop's car parked in front of the station wagon. Why didn't he check the station wagon before going to the house? How did he see the people outside the house when it was far in the woods? How did he return to his car so quickly? This is a movie with lots of writing and continuity problems.Sis leaves her baby in the car when she checks the police car, and naturally it's gone when she returns. She goes into the woods, also manages to come across the same house, and asks to use the phone. She freaks out there, and scares a teenage girl who stopped by the house to use the phone. Surprising the old lady's palm reading business wasn't more popular at such a popular location!The autistic son had gone into the woods also and knocked himself out. He too goes to the house, and eventually gets sucked into the ground, like a character in Tomaselli's Desecration, which is more interesting than this movie!And on it goes. Much of the musical score is quite poor, particularly the instrumental song that is apparently supposed to be playing on the radio. The acting is just execrable, almost all-around. I couldn't say whether this was the casting or the direction of the actors. Ellen Sandweiss is OK, and attractive, but has a small role. There are horror clichés aplenty, like one character finding it easier to jump out what is apparently a third story window, than trying to break through a thin first-story door with a large window in it. The ending is pathetic, a steal from Evil Dead that I suppose is meant as a tribute, but just feels cheap.Avoid!

This is by no means meant to be taken seriously as a film as it's a film based on a silly tale of the Jersey Devil (like Bigfoot,Yeti,The Mothman) it's a bogeyman made up to keep people out of the desolate Pine Barrens region who from what I understand is miles upon miles of wooded area,that's easy to get really lost in.The old lady was supposed to be the ghost of the woman who bore The Jersey Devil,Mrs Leeds &it seems both she & 2 of her half-wit kids rob & murder anyone who's car breaks down & if they don't get you the Satanists who sacrifice their victims to the Devil & "his son"will.This reminded me of a great 80's B-movie from Troma called Mothers Day.The actresses are 2 of my favorites from previous B horror films.The lead is Felissa Rose from Sleepaway Camp fame & her sister in the film is Ellen Sandweiss from The Evil Dead, who is the chic who gets some horrible tree love & then is the first to go demonic in the film,well in this she is a terrorized Mom w/h a baby. Both actresses are NEVER going to be top Hollywood stars but to their fans after nearly 20 + years of not seeing them in anything it was a pleasant surprise.Also the old woman who plays Mrs Leeds was an extremely creepy old Italian woman who would've made a great witch & the daughter in the pigtails is one of the most nightmarish characters i've seen in a long time.You can obviously tell director Dante Tomaselli grew up on B-horror from his video store from the 80's as this film has that type of feel to it all the way through. Their are some seriously ridiculous moments in this film,like why would the cop HAVE TAKEN the girl back to the house where her whole family was murdered without any back-up?He wouldn't! And towards the end it seemed like they were running out of script ( or money) but this was a unexpected delight as if it sucks really bad i usually turn it off within the first 5 mins. And believe me there is a lot of horror out there you'll turn off cause it's so bad.Loved the scene where the old Mrs Leeds character was doing rails of cocaine but another question?Where did she get the coke from?Stolen from a dead victim? The SAatanists? The jersey Devil? LOL! But this film is good B-movie fun & Liked it immensely.*** OUT OF *****

Wow.I have to say, I've seen a lot of bad films in my time, but not many that can rival Satan's Playground. And, it's not a good kind of bad, either. More like the "shake your head sadly and pity everyone involved" kind of bad.The plot is simply a basic, Texas Chainsaw ripoff. A group of people are stranded in the middle of nowhere and are killed one after another by a family of inbred mutant hicks. Of course, in TCM, the inbreds had to work a bit to take down their prey; in this movie, the victims are dim enough to walk straight up to the horror house one at a time, knock on the door, and ask to use the phone. One right after another, like clockwork. Oh, and there's a lurking monster - the Jersey Devil - thrown in to pick off the stragglers. Just don't expect JD to actually put in an on-camera appearance; that, apparently, was too much effort for this production.But don't worry about the plot so much; most likely, you'll be too distracted by the atrocious casting to worry about it. Our victims, far as I can tell, are a family unit - Mom, Dad, Sis, Sis' baby, and Autistic Bro. Took forever to figure that out, though, since Dad looks about 45-50, Mom looks like she's in her late twenties, Sis looks about 30, while A-Bro is established at 18, and looks about 23. The baby, however, is convincingly infantile. Much like the rest of this flick. (Yeah, I know it's a cheap shot, but can you blame me?) After you've wrapped your head around that, then you can marvel at how... busy the middle of nowhere is. As mentioned above, we've got four separate scenes of the principles wandering up to Casa Mutata, plus another, totally unrelated and irrelevant stranded woman pounding on the door (and basically being told to stand in line behind the rest of the movie if she wants killin'), random Satanists coming up on the weekend to perform unholy rites in the inbreds' front yard, a cop who seems to be patrolling in area (and doesn't bother to check out the stranded vehicle stuck not 20 yards from where he parked), and several cars driving up and down the backwoods dirt roads. One of which won't even slow down to help a fleeing victim.Nothing hangs together, or even appears to be trying to make any sense. Even if you're a fan of the badfilm, I'd recommend you take a pass on this one.

What a mess. And I had good feelings, too, after the first five minutes. After a competent, simple POV attack scene I waited with baited breath, anxiously pondering what horrific form the Jersey Devil would take, what terrible possibilities a film like this could play with . . . and the monster totally dropped out of the movie. The next twenty minutes consisted of three people in a car being "dramatic". Still, I thought, ol' Jersey D can't be far away, eh? No. I'm not even gonna lead you on anymore. After the "character" scenes the movie lurches into a load of bushwah about a psychotic backwoods family and a satanic cult, but you shouldn't bother taking notes, because none of it goes anywhere. At all. It's a completely empty movie, no motivation, no story, not even any scares. You could rearrange all of the scenes and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference. And the Jersey Devil stays a POV shot the whole film. But hey, that's "nightmare logic" for you, right? Right?No, it's crap, and Dante Tomaselli should be called out on it. A bad movie's still bad, even if you can wax philosophic about it on your commentary track, and a movie with no plot can't get away with "nightmare logic" (director's words) if there's nothing else for it to fall back on.