That was an excellent one.

Sick Product of a Sick System

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

TIMBER FALLS is one of the most predictable movies I've seen for a while. It's an unashamed rip-off of the likes of WRONG TURN, complete with scenes of women in ripped clothing running through the woods while pursued by psychotic maniacs. You'd think that such scenes would no longer be trotted out after they were done to death in the 1980s, but it seems they remain perennially popular.The narrative involves a couple of hikers who decide to take a remote track and almost inevitably run afoul of some very strange folk living out in the wilderness. What transpires will surprise nobody, only to say that it involves extended torture sequences that are equally inevitable given the modern appetite for 'torture porn' movies. One thing notable is that the bloodshed is strong but never gratuitous or overly explicit; I didn't feel sick during any of the gruesome scenes as I did with the likes of HOSTEL and SAW. Instead TIMBER FALLShas a clean-spirited B-movie feel which buoys it up somewhat.The acting is generally passable for the genre; Brianna Brown is the requisite pretty blonde scream queen while Josh Randall starts out as a jerk but gradually grows on you out of his sheer persistence alone. The script works hard to create some original motivations for the many villains in the film, but there are some gaping plot holes and the lead guy really is an idiot at times, walking back into a bear trap at one point; it's hard to sympathise with him after this.Nonetheless, despite the plentiful flaws, I liked TIMBER FALLS. It's not art, but it is mildly entertaining and good for a single watch; the perfect sort of switch-off-your-brain-and-watch B-movie with all the action and blood you could hope for.

How in real life could someone be such a looser to make all those mistakes that got the characters in trouble over and over again? This is a lousy, but really lousy movie! Long time since I last saw something unpleasant like this thing. How come after being threatened by the brothers you throw away your gun? How come after fighting with the women, the main character goes down to the basement without first making sure she would not constitute a threat to him? And he didn't even look for a gun? And the list continues on and on, this was a really big disappointment to me, sorry. Not criticizing the actors here, they did what they could, but, who wrote this plot? Is this the best he can do?

"Timber Falls" is like a "Saw" movie without the charm. There are a handful of good things in this tiresome gore-fest, but nothing that can't be traced to older, better movies--well, nothing except the wonderful Beth Broderick, who is so transcendentally good here she might be playing Lady Macbeth inside "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 14". (The person connected with this film who seems most deserving of torture is the agent who persuaded her to sign on. Is this all she's offered these days?) It's been, what, forty years since "Deliverance"--hasn't the evil-hillbillies-attacking-pampered-city-folk plot line had its day? And is it some kind of law that the protagonists of every horror thriller need to make increasingly stupid decisions that make the audience hate them? The female lead here is required to trip and fall TWICE while fleeing her attacker (each time taking about twenty minutes to gather herself together again); the only fresh twist is that the male lead is even more stupid (he trips too, and also backs right into a bear trap.) Once captured, this unappealing couple does nothing but scream and beg for over an hour while the religious-fanatic villains subject them to witless, boring ordeals. If we cared about the leads, or if they were resourceful enough to try some psychological wit-matching (at least), there might be genuine suspense. As it is, there's nothing to look forward to but more and more (fake-looking) gore, topped by an ending that doesn't try for cleverness or plausibility. (If you can't have one, you need the other badly).

. . . yet another backwoods, genetically played-out bunch of rapists and murderers. I'd actually had a decent run lately of NOT saying, "Well, there's another 97 minutes of my life I'll never get back"--and, hey, I watch reality TV, people.Where to start? Well, how about at the start, when we know immediately that the gun and phone will both be needed. Could it be any heavier-handed? Well, sure it could. Like naming one of the trails the Donner Trail. Somewhat less so is the reference to Willow Creek Trail (Willow Creek being one of the U.S.'s most influential evangelical megachurches), but combine that with the stranger lady's remarks about wedding rings and things being equal in the eyes of the Lord, and the couple's immediate confession (why, to this total stranger?) that they aren't married, and you have a good idea where this is going.Very shortly, the film becomes, in my mind, unforgivable. It's bad enough that our couple decides a tentless, broad-daylight rut in the woods is a good way to get some rest on the hike, but that Our Hero not only doesn't shoot any or all of the three rubes but obeys his girlfriend's unfathomable insistence that he rid his gun of all the bullets is beyond the pale. I mean, heck, I'm a pacifist, antivivisectionist vegetarian with Mennonite and Jainist tendencies, and I'm pretty sure I'd have shot the weirdos in the kneecaps and got outta Dodge.And then Cheryl--she who originally seemed to have some brights because she insisted on taking the phone--not only feels frisky that night, after the twisted events of the day, but decides to take a solitary nude dip in the lake at dawn? Sh-yeah, right. That's exactly what you'd do if some menacing creep with a gun had been sniffing the crotch of your jeans, I'll bet.Like something else I've heard tell of, this just kept rolling downhill. The cinematic ripoffs proliferated (even ripping off Dusk Till Dawn via Deacon's fantasy), and there wasn't a single shock or chill, although there was plenty of the disgusting. The one thing I will credit it for plotwise is that although it included torture--and I am fed up to here with torture in the genre--there was actually a motive behind it that the bad guys could allow themselves to believe in. (Not that that carries a whole lot of weight for me. The Saw crap tries the same thing, and should utterly fail in the mind of any halfway sane person.) Because of this, the bizarre wedding scene, and the usually reasonable production values, I give it a 2 instead of a 1, although I am sorely tempted to deduct both points on the basis of the last second of the film.One last thing--I'm not only tired of stupid stupid stupid characters and disgusting stuff passing as horror, I'm a little cheesed at religious people so often being depicted as deranged. I could not help, watching this schlock, remembering when my Jewish ex-boyfriend and I went primitive camping in the UP of Michigan some 35 years ago. This was in an era when a LOT of people really did revile you for living together before marriage, and when being a non-Christian American seemed rather rare. We met a born-again Christian and his Catholic wife, who not only did not shame us for our religious views and marital status (which were divulged naturally in the course of conversation) but put up a tarp for us in a rainstorm and then shared their dry firewood and fresh fish with us, sitting up late into the night, talking, drinking coffee, and being kind. I never saw them again--although we did correspond a little that year--but I have never forgotten them and their kindness and acceptance. I wish I'd spent 97 minutes last night trying to find out what had become of them instead.