3 out of 5

Director: Rob Schmidt

You’ve certainly seen all of these plotting elements in horror before – teenish group breaks down in the woods, goes to a house for help and it ends up being the WRONG house – but horror has been doing the same thing for years, and it’s all in the execution.  Director Rob Schmidt and writer Alan McElroy work together to actually do something nifty with the genre, though, working our leads plausibly into the situation, making them not annoying, and – for the most part – having them make proper decisions.  Desmond Harrington is on his way to a job interview (he’s a doctor, so he’s our smart one) when he’s rerouted due to traffic onto a dirt road where he crashes into a car that would be carrying Eliza Dushku (the practical girl), Emmanuelle Chriqui (the slutty girl), Jeremy Sisto (the dumb guy), Kevin Zegers (the funny guy) and Lindy Booth (the serious girl).  Would be except they were already out and about thanks to some barbed wire purposefully laid out on the road… So now the whole group sets out for help, and finds a backwoods cabin that happens to belong to some freaky inbred lookin’ locals, lovingly madeup b Stan Winston.  But instead of people dying from dumb decisions, they know to book it ASAP and seem to respond realistically enough.  Schmidt also knows his audience wants gore so splashes it in there, but finds his moments to execute some originality and really goes for it.  Overall you can’t do much with these stories, and so it can’t go far beyond three stars, but I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of effort put in to what could’ve been a throwaway flick.