Madison County (2011)

A-Z Horror Movie of the Day..."Madison County" (R - 2011 - US)Sub-Genre: SlasherMy Score: 5.4Cast=4 Acting=5 Plot=4 Ending=7 Story=5 Scare=5 Jump=5 F/X=6 Blood=7 Twist=6A group of college kids travel to a small, mountain town called Madison County to interview the author of a tell-all book on the accounts of several grisly murders that happened there.Pretty much your basic stasher...college kids...mountain town...killer in a pig mask...nothing you haven't seen before. There is some solid blood and the ending had a little bit of originally to it. At best this is a mediocre slasher flick...I enjoyed it enough, as it had some of the elements I wanted in the genre. You could certainly do better, fellow horror lovers...but you could do a lot worse.

lol....the new definition of bad = madison country.....really really bad film, don't know where to begin and where to end.... acting, filming, characters, story, effects.....everything is bad. so ... the ending too, i don't understand how someone can bring out this piece of crap....to say some positive....the only good thing in this film is the cover, and that's all !do your self a favour....skip itrobertgreetings from cologne, Germany

When will American college students ever learn? All they seem to do is constantly drive off to remote towns in the mid-west in groups of four or five and get killed.The five of this batch of kids has obviously never seen a slasher film (as perhaps has the writer, otherwise he might realise how 'borrowed' every element of this movie actually is) as they stop at an out-of-the-way diner where every snaggle-toothed yokel stares at them menacingly. They pay for food, but never eat (I didn't get that bit!) then leave, only to be threatened by another knife-wielding nut-job.So, what do they do? All decide to split up. No sooner does this happen than a psycho in a pig mask hunts them down one by one as they run, screaming through the woods in random directions. Sometimes one of the teenagers manages to fight back and knock out the killer, but they never bother finishing him off - only knocking him to the floor so he gets straight back up to chase them down again. Oh, and they never bother finding or keeping a weapon.What you have here is nothing you haven't seen a hundred times before in the slasher genre. The only way this film would be any good is if you invented a time machine, sent it back to the early seventies and showed it to people then. Therefore, Madison County would be the 'film that started it all' and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would just be a poor imitation. Sadly, in the real world, it's the other way around.http://thewrongtreemoviereviews.blogspot.co.uk/

Opening sequence: young woman wakes up in the back of a pickup, wearing just bra and panties. She jumps out and runs. The man driving the truck stops, runs after her with a shovel. He knocks her out, carries her back, throws her into the back seat. A local looks on, says nothing, seems unperturbed by it.Three young men (Will, James, Kyle) and two young women (Jenna, Brooke) go for a trip to the sticks to interview an author of a book about a serial killer in Madison County. The author has no phone or computer; hence letters and the current interview.About 24 minutes in, the group reaches Madison County and stops for lunch. They ask about the book, Devil in the Woods, the book's author David Randall, and the main character in the book, Damian Ewell. They eventually get the author's address and go there.They find a nice house on private property, but no one answers the door.Kyle does some more digging for information, while the other four hang out at the address they were given. Kyle looks over a cemetery (looking for headstones), then areas nearby. He sees two girls topless in a stream, and tries to start a conversation. The villain comes up behind him, the girls see him, Kyle turns, and gets stabbed to death. The girls do not react at all even though there is a freshly dead human body in the stream with them. This is like the opening sequence: the lack of affect at outrageous events.The foursome explore near the house. Will and Brooke get separated from James and Jenna. Further James and Jenna get separated. Clever. Will buys his real estate while relieving himself. Brooke sees the body of her boyfriend and runs.Jenna and Brooke find each other. James talks to Erma at the diner again. Erma lets him know his time on earth is limited. The killer goes after the young women first. Jenna runs decoy for Brooke, who neither runs away nor helps her friend. The killer does Jenna in with an ax.James is captured along with a father (David Randall, from an earlier scene) and daughter (the young woman from the first sequence). James and the daughter escape, but the David does not. Brooke makes it back to the diner, which is now deserted. Erma claims she has not seen any of Brooke's friends, then offers to drive Brooke to a doctor. Then Erma (Damian's mother) knifes her to death.----Scores----Cinematography: 8/10 Jumpy camera work for perhaps four minutes, but usually quite good.Sound: 6/10 High differences in sound levels. Poor choices of incidental music. Accents? Actors sound like Los Angeles television most of the time. Conversational sound levels were consistently clear.Acting: 6/10 I've seen much worse.Screenplay: 5/10 This was pretty thin. Perhaps the kids might have set a date and a time and a place to meet the author first? That's too much to ask, I guess. The lack of affect by the locals could have used better exposition. Of course, this helps the "by the time you figure it out, it's too late" feeling of helplessness.