PLOT: A group of friends gather at a remote house in the woods to celebrate a birthday and get killed off one by one by an unseen terror in the woods.
This is another one of those micro-budget movies that I stumbled upon on Amazon Prime (the other one being Terrortory). Really, the only reason I decided to watch this one is that I live not far from the area it takes place. If I had to rank these two super-independent films, this one would be a distant second. The reason? Competency.
Bucks County Massacre does a fine job with the set-up. The first 45 minutes plays out like you’d think it would for a found footage movie set at a party. It’s a little bro-y, if that makes any sense, which is pretty in-line with 2010, but is already kind of out of date for tolerable behavior (or maybe that’s just me getting older). It works, though, you get a sense of every character and it feels naturally; I’d suspect there’s a decent amount of improvisation going on. However, the film fails itself in the last half of it.
When shit starts to go down, the movie fails. The seams of the actors’ acting ability starts to show, and what’s left is a bunch of people screaming at each other or in the woods. There’s authenticity to it, but there’s no progression in it.
A big problem with this film is that there’s no one to hang your hat on, someone to root for. I’m not rooting against anyone, but there are no heroes here. The closest thing we get is Steve, the camera guy and war veteran, but he’s not a man of action like you’d expect him to be, and spends a great deal of time during the climax hiding by himself in the basement.
There’s a little bit of gore, but we’re really robbed of any sort of money shot with any of the kills. When the group happens upon the first body, there’s some graphicness, but everything else happens in a motion blur of a hasty camera move.
Gore Rating: 1.5 out of 5
The end has two decent moments of scares, but nothing really ever gets delivered. We wait around for a while for things to happen, and when it does, it all seems rushed.
Scare Rating: 1.5 out of 5
Nothing.
Sex/Nudity Rating: 0 out of 5
OVERALL
This movie does a fine job of setting up something that never delivers the goods. It’s a pretty amateur film, which is fine given the fact that this is a found footage movie, but the movie starts to unravel just when it should be getting good. It becomes far too screechy at the end and we never really get a good payoff.
The Main Damie 