Backwoods Bloodbath: Curse Of The Black Hodag

A while ago I bought a DVD for $5 called "The Midnight Horror Collection Vol. 3" which is an 8 movie pack (as the case reminds you).  I... have no excuse why.  The only thing I can offer is to say that I once made a short film that was so bad that I took it off YouTube because it was terrible.  Anyway, MST3K be dammed, this involves my loves of booze, movies, writing, and finding fault in other peoples hard work.  So here's the first review and remember, I get pogressively drunker as the review goes on:
This is the first one of the eight that I watched. The worst part of that is this movie teased me with potential. For the first act it seemed like I may have lowered my expectations too much. Yes the acting was fucking terrible, but there were a couple of genuinely funny moments (when one of the girls is on the phone to her mom and the guys are in the background yelling “penis” made me laugh; I didn't say they were high-brow funny moments) and the script looked like it was one more draft away from being a pretty decent psycho/monster-in-the-woods movie. There were a few characters that were added just for the body count (the topless camper being the most ridiculous), but it still seemed like it might turn out to be not terrible.

Then the second act started and one of the main characters got stabbed in the chest. And then he “lost a lot of blood”. And then didn't die. While two others dragged him back to the cabin. After removing the weapon (everyone knows that's the exact wrong thing to do if you're not getting immediate medical help, right? I guess not). And then continues to lie on the couch bleeding internally (one would assume) while the other five go about their business. “Their business” being “pair off to fuck” except for the one guy who's been drunkenly listening to just the one football game for the entire day. This is where you start to think the script needed more than just one more draft before going into production because two of the characters (one who has a “hilariously” guy-in-a-wig picture of his girlfriend who he wasn't going to cheat on) start hooking up as they're in the other empty cabin in the woods. I should remind people that the only reason they went to that other cabin is specifically to look for help for their dying friend. Luckily the monster is in the attic snacking on a redneck and can interrupt them and chase them down. Meanwhile the other pair are fulfilling what was obviously supposed to be the movie writer's fantasy crush on the popular girl from high school who lived next door to the “artistic” loser who “came into his own in college” (actual dialogue from the movie). Hint: that means they're fucking while her super-jock ex-boyfriend (who refers to himself in the third person... and inexplicably has everyone else refer to him in the third person throughout the whole movie as well) lies on the couch still bleeding out. The only redeeming part of this is that the dying guy gets to say the line “that's cool; just bang while The Brent's dying”. Also, this sex scene has the most ridiculous and out of place close up of a nipple in the history of movies. Also, I'm fairly sure the nipple in question belonged to the other actress anyway (it's the only nudity in the scene and the participating actress is next seen from the back pulling her shirt on without showing anything).

Anyway, then what I assume is the third act begins when the local whose dad has been hunting the monster for years and who is now... dead(? that's never really explained unless it was while I was during a scene I was gone to refill my drink) shows up and says his truck only seats two. Sense: that makes none for so many reasons. Also, now the guy that's been lying on the couch after being stabbed in the chest and too weak to walk on his own (even though he's been smoking and drinking moonshine but let's not get into that) is now standing and going out of character to be noble enough to give his ex the second seat in the truck. Once again: a truck only seats two and two people (one healthy and armed with a rifle and the other bleeding out of his chest for about half the day in movie time) are telling the girl to take it even though she's completely healthy and, one would assume, capable of defending herself better than the guy with the severe (?) chest wound. Then there's some terrible writing (my god did it ever fall off by this point...), some worse acting, and the obligatory “I'll bring help back” before she and the monster hunter leave the two high school enemies alone in the woods waiting for the monster to show up. Yes, that makes as little sense as it sounds. Don't worry, though, while that's going on the monster's busy killing the drunk football fan. Even though he's a main character and responsible for a good portion of the intentional (and most of the unintentional because he's the worst actor of the bunch) comedy, you're still basically rooting his death by this point just hoping he can redeem himself with a decent death scene. He cannot. Also, there's still about a third of the movie left where the jock and the loser from high school are left to talk with each other and make amends (do you think someone was working out some issues of their own when they wrote this script?). Plus, now everything's being shot through a red filter because they decided to go sit and share a drink in the improvised dark room rather than the room they were just in. Also, the “artist” set up a dark room to develop his pictures (the movie being made well after digital cameras become the norm) in one of the cabin's bedrooms in like two seconds the first day they were there. That... that just kinda bugs me for some reason.

Anyway, then a few shots of the body count going up (by the way, there are two glue sniffing locals that are trying to do the milk challenge earlier in the movie, you finally get to see the last one die; they're the only two that can challenge the football fan for worst acting, so this is a highlight) and we cut to the monster hunter and the last girl in the truck where she asks if there's any chance her friends are alive. He says no, but that's to be expected. What's not to be expected is the coldly indifferent look on her face as she asks. Seriously, even with the low acting of this cast, that was definitely a conscious choice on her part. This bitch does not care if her friends are alive. She's about to slit this monster-hunter's throat, survive the ensuing truck crash, hack his head off, and bring it to the monster. Then she'll say something like “that's one for me. Looks like I've got some catching up to do.” then kill the monster and go on a rampage of her own. Fuck do I wish this movie was that randomly awesome. It's not. Instead they talk about the monster some more, making it sound like a bear preparing to hibernate and cutting between the two of them even though it's only the monster hunter talking and she's just sitting there with a look of “what have I done with my life to be in this movie?” on her face. Then we have a ridiculous back story of the monster where it (or its ancestor) kills TWENTY-THREE PEOPLE and is then “regarded as a hoax”. Seriously. Also, random red tones again. Not sepia to depict the past, just red. Very sloppy film making.

Now is when we get the “remorseful jock making amends with the artist” scene I talked about before. But “oh shit!” after the jock pours his heart out and says the artist was the better man there's a twist: he sees a picture of one of the other main characters dead and the artist one punches him. Then some more in the truck that's not important other than to show that there is a monster out there, then the most... I've used 'ridiculous' too much. What's a better term here? “Ass-tarded”? “Cousin-fuckingly-stupid”? “Triple ding-dongs on the poorly thought out plot twist meter”? Probably one of the first two but whatever the case, there's a plot twist. The artist (I keep wanting to say “nerd” but that's detrimental to anyone that was a loser in high school and were considered a nerd; plus he called himself an “artist” in the movie; just wanted to clear that up) is shown to be the one killing the the three super-jock guys of the group that went to the cabin (yes, this is the one slasher movie that has a ratio of two guys-per-girl for their main characters; take that as you will) but conspicuously leaves out any of the locals since there actually is a Hodag.

Then the most god-awful, cringe-worthy, “dude, you're making us all look bad”, writer-talking-through-the-character-monologues ever made. Made only worse by the fact it's delivered by a terrible actor. We get it. High school sucked. Join the fucking club. Then it's a poor knee to the groin (seriously, better acting from the drama class I had in high school than in this movie), continuity errors all over the place, the Die Hard “no bullets, Hans?” scene played too obvious for suspense, more continuity errors, and then some of (not all, remember, the worst actors are dead) the worst acting in the movie. Followed by a definite contradiction of the reality of the movie in that she runs away, shouts back to taunt him (stupid but at this point stupid isn't enough to warrant comment), and then is at a barn in seconds rather than the minimum three mile run to a different cabin (at this point, “barn”/farm or cabin is relative, I guess) the characters had established before as for reasons why they didn't get help for their dying friend. Also: everything is green now. This is harder to justify than the “red light because we're in a dark room” idea. I should mention, this barn was the opening scene with the most painful almost sex scene put to film since the shower scene in “Zombo 3: Robo-Zombo” (sorry to John Vaghn, but that was comically painful). The opening scene had the worst redneck impersonator since Larry The Cable Guy hooking up with a lingerie-clad “actress” (the term used as loosely as always in this movie) and him getting sliced up before she goes looking for him and then getting sliced up. Originality: not so much.

Anyway, we're back in the barn that had two people murdered in it that no one ever mentioned again except now with a new coloured light bulb. How is this going to play out? With a successful challenge to the title of “worst acting in this movie”. She rolls up to her dead friends and... is terrible. There are dead people hanging on hooks (that's the necessary over-stating of facts this movie inspires) and the killer shows up, still bloody but not dead and promptly gets killed by the monster. Who ignores the healthy girl and... At this point I'm ¾ of the way through a 26 and even I find the rest of this shit retarded. Not just “bad movies are bad because they don't have the budget to be good” bad, just regular “this is fucking stupid” bad. The monster bites about ¼ of the killer's face, and the wound is half a bloody face. Literally. Now the lone survivor finds a quad that's been sitting outside this whole time (I guess) and she rides it back to... you know what? This whole sequence is about as cousin-fuckingly-retarded as it gets. There's even production numbers on the window of the truck. I'll put it this way: for some reason the monster hunter is still alive even though they crashed and left him for dead a long time ago, and he now comes in and shoots the monster after it's trapped... fuck. This whole movie fell apart.

Now the monster hunter is dying (from the injuries he died from before) and telling the girl she's the new Hodag hunter even though she has no experience hunting anything and is just a runner in a “horror” movie. Also, not relevant to anything, but this is probably the one time ever that the “lone surviving girl” is less hot after the fact than she was beforehand. They may have pulled a “The Room” and just replaced her hoping everyone wouldn't notice or replaced her because they'd all be as drunk as me or have been too disgusted by everything to be bothered to sit through the movie to this point, OR (and this is the least likely) it's just a matter of her looking hot earlier and not anymore. The final moments: The one girl getting away and then falling for the dying monster hunter so she can take over for him (even though she met him the day before... yes, the day before). Then a “dream scene”. Then she wakes up. And a news-like voice over, and a shout out to the first scene where the body is hanging (and jerking around) out of an attic. Then the voice-over tells you there might be a sequel.
Worst ending ever.