Barricade

I don’t know how they pulled it off, but they somehow found a way to make a film about people getting murdered by mutant cannibals in Germany’s Black Forest that completely sucks. I can, off the top of my head, name any number of mutant cannibal movies that I enjoy a good deal more than I should, and the delightful idea for the setting should have been just icing on the cake, but alas, it was not to be.

Let me start with the good, I guess. I haven’t heard any German rap music since I was in college, so it was a nice moment when everyone’s listening to it in the car. Now that I’ve spoken about the good, let’s delve into how this movie fails. First, we have the characters. Two guys and a girl, and there is not the slightest reason to care about any of them whatsoever. Indeed, the girl in particular (the one we’re supposed to root for the most, based on what happens, I guess) is really bitchy and irritating, even rudely yelling at a stranger for trying to warn them away from the killers in the woods. It’s hard to really appreciate the killers either; they’re retarded, so it’s not like we can really delve into their psyches and find out what makes them tick, and they don’t even at least manage to have cool looks to them. They’re just utterly wasted.

Another major problem is the terrible editing. It’s clumsy and amateurish and completely ruins any kind of continuity within the film. A perfect example comes from one of the random throwaway deaths early on. A girl is sitting in a clearing, waiting for her newly dead boyfriend to return from peeing. We get a shot from behind her, with the camera moving into a sneakier position to show us the killers’ eye view. Then the camera cuts to a shot of her from the front, and we can see a complete lack of anyone behind her. Then we cut back to the killer sneaking up on her, then another shot from the front with no killer to be found, then back to sneaking up, etc. I can only conclude that the director was drinking heavily the whole time he was in the editing room. This is to say nothing of one of the film’s main ways of padding out the running time, which is to intercut scenes with our main characters with scenes of random people being tortured and murdered. This is a very bloody movie, mainly from all these random shots of gore shoehorned into the film, but not only do these scenes not really connect at all to the main plot (aside from reaffirming that the cannibals kill a lot of people), the gore really isn’t all that impressive. The lack of a proper budget really shines through here, as it does with the crappy video cameras. Apparently there wasn’t enough in the budget to afford filmstock, or at least proper digital cameras, causing the whole film to look fuzzy and slightly out of focus.

There really is very little to recommend about this film. If all you want is a film packed with blood and guts, then by all means go for it. Just keep in mind that the film fails on pretty much every level. The acting is terrible, the story is terrible, the filmmaking is terrible, hell, even the nudity is terrible (Note to any woman reading this: don’t get your nipples pierced. Seriously, it just makes you look like trailer trash). Even if you’re just looking for constant gore, there are much better choices to go with. I’ll suggest Ichi the Killer for now. If you’re good little boys and girls I might make more recommendations later.

Rating: Zero stars