Perhaps in one of the lower tiers of horror film franchises — The Championship compared to The Premier League of A Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday The 13th – creator Alan B. McElroy’s series is built around families of flesh-eaters hunting people in West Virginia through a series of imaginative booby traps and improvised weaponry (think Home Alone if Kevin McCallister were a blood-thirsty cannibal). The seventh entry in the cycle is a reboot, written by McElroy and directed by Mike P. Nelson (The Domestics). It adds a new dimension to the killer clans, but there is not enough here to make it feel fresh or original.
A genre film peopled with thin characters and bogged down by tin-eared dialogue.
The set-up is as old as the (Appalachian) hills. A group of young folk — this time round they are millennials so include app designer Adam (Dylan McTee), oncologist Milla (Emma Dumont), bistro owners Luis (Adrian Favela) and Gary (Vardaan Arora), non-profit worker Darius (Adain Bradley) and Jen (Charlotte Vega), an art/history student currently working as a barista — head off on vacation, hiking through the woods, only to be picked off by gangs of famished forest-dwellers. The problem is, you can’t help but feel that the gang are so self-aware they would know they are in a horror film (especially when they are on the end of such lines as, “Keep to the marked trail. The land can be unforgiving”), but Nelson doesn’t allow for such sophistication. It’s a genre film peopled with thin characters and bogged down by tin-eared dialogue, dissipating involvement when the terrors come.
The story invests the horror with faintly interesting Trumpian overtones as the cannibals are revealed to be ‘The Foundation’, a community of people who have lived in the mountains for hundreds of years, appalled by the turns American civilisation has taken. This political dimension is new to the franchise but the idea of the creepy cult falls well short of Midsommar’s sense of terror in an isolated society. Still, some of the set-pieces, such as an out-of-control tree-trunk chasing the group through the forest, come off smartly, and the third act admirably takes the action in a different direction. Matthew Modine turns up as Jen’s concerned father looking for the gang, but even he can’t elevate it from the mostly over-familiar mire.
