We pick up ten years after the events of The Redwood Massacre. Tom (Jon Campling), the father of one of the Redwood Killer’s victims, has written a book about the Redwood Massacre. While on a book tour, an obsessed fan named Max (Damien Puckler) claims he’s discovered new evidence of the Killer’s whereabouts, prompting the author and his daughter Laura (Danielle Harris) to join in a search of the area. Little does the family realize, the fanboy is also a serial killer himself and may be leading them into a trap.
It seems that returning writer/director David Ryan Keith went into this sequel with the intention of playing with the audience’s expectations. Everywhere the first film zigged, this one zags. Instead of having an English cast this time out, they managed to get nothing but American actors (including Halloween franchise fan favorite Harris). Instead of taking place in the woods, it’s set in an underground military base/mad scientist lab where the hulking killer was born and bred. Speaking of the killer, he’s given a lot less screen time in this one, which means the body count is lower and the gore isn’t as over the top. (We still get plenty of stabbing, hacking, gut ripping, and head lopping though.)
Like a lot of sequels, Keith’s under the impression that bigger is better. The budget is obviously larger, we have not one, but two killers, and the running time is expanded to a cumbersome one-hundred-and-three minutes. The killer is also given an unnecessary backstory, which I guess can be said for many horror sequels. I’m not saying that it doesn’t work. It’s just that it doesn’t work quite as well as the first time around, and there are a lot more lulls in between the highlights.
Harris is likable as ever. She gives a feisty performance and is credible in her ass-kicking scenes. She also gets a memorable moment where she gun-punches someone. Puckler is pretty good too as the fledgling serial killer as he looks like a slightly more intense version of Casper Van Dien. Their efforts don’t quite push this one into the win column, but they do help keep it afloat throughout the overly bloated running time.
AKA: Redwood Massacre 2: Annihilation.
No comments:
Post a Comment