Carnage Park (2016)

Old school grindhouse movies typically operate by using some sort of hook to bring the viewer in (extreme violence, sex/nudity, bizarre sights, etc). The rest of the movie is often poorly produced as the entire point of the movie is to make a movie as cheap as possible while pulling in a large audience via an appeal to their "baser desires". Modern gindhouse movies either take the idea of the grindhouse hook and ramp it up (Hobo with a Shotgun, Green Inferno, Turbo Kid) or they take the ideas and feel of grindhouse cinema and execute it more elegantly (Tarantino's and to an extent Rodriguez's works). Carnage Park does neither of these things. What starts off as a heavily Tarantino inspired thriller turns into a rather pedestrian, predictable, and overall boring retelling of The Most Dangerous game. I love grindhouse, I love b movies, I love cheap movies. But this one is a stinker.

You can see they really gave it a good try with this film. In a very broad sense,as a hiker I can see the idea of a sniper up in certain hills here in Southern California and that would be horrifying.But the thing is, you can see that in every single scene the writer, director, even the cinematographer had been influenced -greatly- by other films they had watched and he shows.This movie is almost like multiple movies thrown together and not linked well at all. Another thing to note is the audio/sound guy, you have to wonder if he is self-taught in the garage? It seems he is trying to create or copy a certain type of effect from Goodfellas for instance - but it ends up sounding extremely amateurish.

Carnage Park is a brand new horror film from Director Mickey Keating. Keating put out two pretty solid horror films last year, Pod and Darling, so I was pretty excited check out his latest offering. Plus from the trailer the film looked to have a grindhouse type feel to it, that combined with the fact that the cast featured Pat Healy (Innkeepers, Cheap Thills, Compliance) and Ashley Bell (Last Exorcism, Last Exorcism Part 2, The Day) was enough to make me want to see this on it's release.Almost immediately the film had me interested, the opening scene does a good job of setting the tone of the film, then from there they jump right into a homage to one of the great scenes from Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs". The first thirty minutes or so were very Grind house esque, I liked that a lot. The first character we are introduced to (Scorpion Joe) is a very cool character, the type of character that we usually don't see in horror films like this. Then we are introduced to our leading lady Vivian (Ashley Bell), Bell plays the part well but her character was pretty uninteresting in my opinion. Unfortunately though right at the thirty minute point the film started to get pretty bland. The Grind house style is thrown to the side and instead we are treated to a rather familiar scenario of a cat and mouse game between an attractive female lead and a crazy psychopath. Pat Healy does a decent job as the Killer, he is under used though and does not get enough screen time. Of Keating's three most recent films (Carnage Park, Pod, and Darling) I would say that Carnage Park is the weakest. It really borrows too much from other movies and fails to do much to stand out. It's not a terrible movie, as I said the first thirty minutes were done very well, but the last hour or so of the film is just basically a rinse and repeat of so many other cat and mouse type flicks. Probably worth watching for die hard horror fans who need their horror fix, but outside of that I think most people will find "Carnage Park" fairly bland and boring.

I'm not sure what film the first reviewer here watched but it doesn't sound like the one I saw. Carnage Park is fantastic, with a great level of tension all the way through and while I've never been a fan of Ashley Bell (in her silly paranormal movies) she really was a revelation in this - her first appearance in the film not even looking that important until she takes over. Carnage Park is the kind of film Rob Zombie wishes he could make and while I wasn't that impressed with the directors last offering Darling (though many were) he knocked it out of the park for me this time. Thank god people still put effort into making movies like this instead of garbage and nonsense like The Conjuring 2.