 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Carnage Park • Year: 2016 • Country: USA • Director: Mickey Keating • Main cast: Ashley Bell, Pat Healy, James Landry Hébert • Runtime: 90 minutes • Production company: Diablo Entertainment • TRAILER |
Do you remember when around 10 years ago Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez put the Grindhouse concept back to the theatres and DVD shelves? After their double feature madness Death Proof (2007) and Planet Terror (2007), many independent filmmakers tried their luck with an endless list of fake movie trailers as well as grindhouse and classic explotation inspired films. Names like Hobo with a Shotgun (2011), the early Rob Zombie films or even Robert Rodriguez’s Machete (2010) could be two of the few ones to be saved from dying long forgotten.
Carnage Park seems to be following the trail of these Grindhouse explotation titles, but sadly ends up in the carnage-to-be-forgotten bag. But that is not what I thought at the begining of the movie, because it really starts like a blast. A fast-paced and explosive first minutes, with great editing, music and staging, promised us a film that at the end was not what it delivered. The startpoint wanders unoriginal but the thrilling sequences glued me to the seat. Sadly, it deflates fast and becomes a mediocre rutinary low budget horror film.
Director writer Mickey Keating steals a lot from bigger names like the mentioned before Rob Zombie and Quentin Tarantino, specially with the evident copy of the Reservoir Dogs (1992) opening scene, the lust for easy gore and the arid desertic landscapes. But although the homage to 1970s classic titles like The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is more than evident, the action gets lots in a bunch of references with not a good idea to follow. And after the super exciting first minutes, right after the characters are kind of clumsily introduced, the feeling of being watching an epic film vanishes.
Lots of junkyards, desertic scenarios, dusty gore, a brave anonymous heroine, a fucked up redneck nazi freako, and dissolute families are the ingredients we will taste until the final minute of the film. Everything we have seen before many times, but this time without any innovation. And in this story empty of ideas, the only thing to highlight is the work of the stars duo. The poor innocent woman that was in the wrong place at the wrong time is played by Ashley Bell, a name that we should have in mind in the upcoming years and that already spoiled us with her convincing performance of poor possessed teenage Nell in The Last Exorcism (2010) –read our review here– (also in its sequel, but that title was just not very good, right?). And the junkyard deranged madman played by a creepy Pat Healy, a role that could had been listed as one of the best murderers in films this century if it wasn’t because the movie is so forgettable. The rest is mere routine.
Like a good Grindhouse product, this movie is somehow enjoyable if you want to spend a good popcorn horror time with your friends, but totally disposable. It will probably be seen in many horror festivals along the next years, but I honestly doubt it should have a place in your home DVD collection.
RATE: 4/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4335650
