Wow there's already been five films in this series? Horror films have a low threshold to cross to sequelhood but five is still a special number. Generally it means the series has already jumped the proverbial shark and now is a weird self mutating meme of itself. Here, for example, the best film was 2 which had tongue firmly in cheek unless it was gouged out with an ax. Since then it's been sort of trying to find a villain that could really hold the series together.
They get close here with a rather nice looking older man who is in fact the head of the clan of inbred hillbillies. He can play a scene either soft or hard and definitely keeps the audience on their toes. In this version a small southern town has a halloween/rock concert celebration of a slaughter that occurred pre civil wars. Now the lady sheriff has captured the descendant of these hillbilly mutants and is holding him in jail til the real cops come. But his "boys" are working hard to break him out. In the middle of this mess is a bunch of clicheo teens, and media types. Truly the field for savage mutilation is wide and fertile here. Like other films in this series the violence is extremely graphic.
Overall the film has a good pace and some interesting characters. The cheap roots though are showing in bad effectss and just an overall feeling of cheapness. At best this film has a sort of blind hopefulness that they now have a hook to hang another two or three films. At worst, it's basically more of the same and doubly insulting as it is trading in the fear of southerners.
STRANGE SPANNERS being an accounting of strangeness of the warp and woof of my mind For those of you new here, think of this as 1/2 "Night Gallery" Our Motto: Nos somnium quisnam es futurus fatum quod insolitus tutus vos!
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