The Bottom Line
Pros
- Solid production value
- Competent direction
- Decent gore
Cons
- Irrational, annoying lead characters
- Bad Southern accents
- Not scary
- Stereotyped villains
- Tacked-on horror cliché ending
Description
- Starring Josh Randall, Brianna Brown, Nick Searcy, Beth Broderick, Sascha Rosemann, T.W. Leshner, Branden R. Morgan
- Directed by Tony Giglio
- Rated R
- DVD Release Date: May 13, 2008
Guide Review - 'Timber Falls' DVD Review
The Movie
Timber Falls is a woeful endeavor in so-called torture porn, an oft-reviled horror sub-genre that can provide genuine entertainment, but not when it's as ineptly scripted as it is here.
The setup is textbook: a young yuppie couple, Mike (Randall) and Sheryl (Brown), head to rural West Virginia (redundant?) for a weekend camping trip. Advised by a forest ranger that they should hike either the Donner Trail or Willow Creek Bridge, they instead trek to Timber Falls. Mistake #1.
When Sheryl realizes that Mike has brought a handgun, her moral indignation kicks in, and she makes him throw the bullets away. (This comes AFTER the couple has a run-in with yokels who subtly threaten to rape her.)
The blindly confident Sheryl then thinks it's a good idea to go skinny-dipping alone and proceeds to get snatched by a deformed mountain man. In his desparate attempt to find her, hapless Mike manages to impale his arm, step in a bear trap and almost get stabbed before even encountering the person who took Sheryl. It goes without saying that he too is captured.
The mountain man is part of a Bible-thumping backwoods family looking for a couple to bear a child so that the sterile matriarch can finally have a baby. The hillbillies give the pair a private room and order them to get busy -- or else.
Despite the no-brainer of a choice between having sex with the person you love and being tortured, the willful couple refuses to fornicate -- as if they couldn't use the time it would take to get pregnant to figure out a way to escape. The heroes thus adhere to a morality as absurd as the insane villains.
This is the type of nonsensical material that Timber Falls inundates us with. It's so silly that, on the bright side, it's never dull, although eye rolling is mandatory.
The DVD
The only special feature is a behind-the-scenes feature.
Movie: D
DVD: D+
