Hard Ride to Hell (2010)

A group of friends on a camping trip run afoul of a group of Satanic bikers looking for a live offering to birth the return of the Antichrist and must fight to get away from the crazed cult alive.Actually, not all that bad at all, managing to feel pretty tense and creepy during the opening set-up despite not having a whole lot of action at all and really just selling itself on the ways in which they're conducting affairs, but once they get captured it turns a lot more fun with some nice blood and gore, a couple nice torture scenes and some more, which is mixed nicely with it's chase scene that is a really bigger scene than expected from this kind of film. It looses some energy with the finale, mainly due to it losing the supernatural angle and opting for a normal bloodbath which has it's own pluses but it feels a little out-of-place in a film with the atmosphere it had previously built up, yet it has it's own fun with it's gore-soaked shenanigans. Overall, not all that bad and a pretty enjoyable time.Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and Nudity

Hard Ride to Hell is set in Texas & starts as a group of teenage friends travel through the open isolated desert wastelands in their camper van when they pull over for the night & meet Bob (Brent Stait) a travelling salesman who sells knives. Bedding down for the night the dopey Dirk (Brandon Jay McLaren) decides to wander off to go to the toilet & stumbles upon a gang of Satan worshipping bikers sacrificing some young girls & eating their flesh, the biker's hear Dirk & go after him. Dirk heads straight for the camper van & his friends which lead the cannibal biker's to them as well & they are all held hostage, beaten, tortured & killed. The biker's leader Jefé (Miguel Ferrer) is looking to father the child of Satan, the Antichrist himself & decides that the pretty young Tessa (Laura Mennell) will do so spares her & her boyfriend who sets out to fight back against the biker's & save himself & the love of his life but the biker's have dark supernatural power's that make them nearly impossible to kill...Co-written & directed Penelope Buitenhuis this supernatural horror action thriller isn't too bad but at the same time will struggle to be remembered as a classic, Hard Ride to Hell is passable low budget straight-to-video fare that is maybe better than usual for this type of film but that in itself isn't saying a lot. This runs a fairly predictable path, teenagers get stuck in the open desert & come under attack from some various threat, in this case Satan worshipping cannibal biker's. It moves along at a fair pace, it has a few decent moments in it, some gore, there's a bit action & some vehicle stunts but I found it quite forgettable & nothing special without being utterly terrible. The only real problem I had was that Dirk remains awfully calm considering he has had his arm cut off & I salute his ability to crack a joke at any given moment despite missing an arm & the fact that the biker's can only be killed inside a Church on Holy ground & just by some complete coincidence the survivors decide to hide & fight it out inside a Church yet not knowing about their weakness. Oh, & I don't understand why Jefé just doesn't kill Bob at the end when he has the chance but, you know, whatever.There's a bit of gore here, an arm is chopped off, someone is made to walk over broken glass, there are a few stabbings, some chainsaw mayhem at the end as hands are cut off & people are sliced open but like the rest of the film while it's entertaining enough it's forgettable & doesn't leave much of an impression. The supernatural & action aspects aren't particularly well balanced but at least there's something happening more often than not. This is actually quite similar in theme to the classic Race with the Devil (1975) but is maybe a touch more generic.Probably shot on a low budget this has decent production values & is reasonably well made. The acting is nothing special with Miguel Ferrer who played the guy in Robocop (1987) who gets kneecapped the only face I recognised, he gets to shout & say all sorts of evil sounding lines & has fun with it but like everything else about Hard Ride to Hell he's forgettable.Hard Ride to Hell is a better than average straight-to-video low budget horror thriller that is mildly entertaining for what it is but I would struggle to say that it's a classic or anywhere near approaching one. You could do worse but then again you could do better.

I was in the mood for a hardcore horror flick so I went a-searchin' and stumbled across Hard Road To Hell and I gotta say, I wasn't disappointed. There is just about everything thrown into this soup of gore. You got your crazy bikers terrorizing young teens, possessed young woman spitting up vomit while impregnated with the devil's child, flesh eating ghouls, with a low budget hero straight out of Assault on Precinct 13 up against some bad ass Legion villain. I'm tellin' ya it's Race With The Devil meets the Exorcist if it happened in the Hills Have Eyes world. Some of it is just hokey like the big dudes with leather masks but that at least offers some fun between scenes of amputation and throat cutting. Toward the end it really transcends the whole straight to video genre with a John Wooish church scene of good against evil. Young adults in a camper being chased by Satanic flesh eating bikers: ah, hell, how can you go wrong. It's horror galore.

Now here's a movie that captures the sort of drive-in, grindhouse feel that I like. In spite of its low budget, it's a pretty well-made, acted and written tale of a group of traveling friends who inadvertently come across a group of Satanic bikers in the middle of a sacrifice and soon find themselves fighting for their lives. You had me at the mention of Satanic bikers, but the movie itself is paced very well. It's bloody and moves quickly. There are some acting issues, but there always are with low budget DTV movies, and there's enough going on that it's not a problem. Major props for the use of mostly real special effects. There's a tiny bit of dodgy CGI, but it's way better than a lot of other low budget films. Also, the ending is a tad anticlimactic, but there's so much fast paced violence before it that it goes down easy. The characters are handled well, a group of kids doing Habitat for Humanity work as well as a traveling salesman who's pretty handy with a knife. Also, Miguel Ferrer is perfectly hammy as the evil biker leader and seems to be having a lot of fun in the role. Though it's got some similarities to a few other films, there's plenty of fun things to enjoy: Satanic rituals, unkillable bikers (one biker gets his face dragged along moving asphalt....great scene!) nudity, torture, stabbings, and women impregnated with demon children. This throwback could've easily played at drive-ins in the 70s. Not the world's greatest horror movie, but a lot better and more fun than most of the garbage that goes straight to video.