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Six friends, Carly (Cuthbert), her boyfriend Wade (Padalecki), her brother Nick (Murray) and his
buddy, her best friend Paige (Hilton), her best friend's boyfriend Blake set out to watch the college football championship. After missing a shortcut, they decide to spend
the night in the woods. The following morning, Wade finds his car tampered with and together with Carly, hitchhikes with a local to find a replacement fan belt in the
nearest town, Ambrose. They meet Bo Sinclair (Van Holt), the gas station's owner, and soon discover they might be the only real persons in the town.
The film has nothing much more to offer story-wise if one has seen the trailers. The story is
so predictable and typical of its genre—it can be any other movie where "college friends get trapped in some obscure place where a killer relentlessly hunts them to end in a
blood bath". Save for Cuthbert and Murray, the actors are a little stiff and clinical in their screams of panic and terror. One weakness of the movie is that it
emphasizes the grueling slaughter of the characters, blood spills and dismemberments, and in the process fails to narrate a sound, credible story. Vincent and Bo are
murdering innocent people with no substantial cause, other than the possibility that their maltreatment as children by their own parents may have caused their apparent dementia.
The writer should have provided for a basic requirement for their actions: motivation. But as it is, the viewer is left to supply the missing pieces of this jigsaw
puzzle. What saves this extremely bloody film are the good scoring, imaginative editing, fantastic visual effects and the ingenious cinematography which delivers intense
images.
One of the more disturbing things about the film is the characters' moral makeup. A night
out with the boyfriend is an excuse to have sex, commitment is not part of a relationship, an open door naturally invites trespassing and snooping, it is cool to be wild and
annoying, etc. An interesting issue that mature audiences may see in the film is sibling relationships—whether they are normal or wounded kids, siblings by nature care for and
will protect each other at all costs. Note the lengths Nick goes to in rescuing his sister from the killers, and the blind dedication which Vincent has for his
killer-mastermind brother Bo.
(Date Reviewed: 26 May 2005)
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