The director of the Robert killer doll movies and the Halloween Jack killer scarecrow movies makes two real-life home invasion stories into horror movies with a crossover character. As with most of these true murder crime films, if liberties are taken to embellish on what happened, it runs the risk of feeling exploitative. Yet if the film sticks more to facts, it is sometimes a reminder that fiction is often more interesting than fact…
CABIN 28 (2017)
Cabin 28 assures us it is simply inspired by a crime story from 1981 and not factual, which might explain why I found it to be the better of these two home invasion films. It is faster paced, more suspenseful, and eventually, quite brutal.
A mother and her children have moved to a new town, so a few irrelevant neighbor characters are introduced before we get to the good stuff.
One son and daughter go out one evening, leaving the other teen daughter home with her mom and her younger brothers.
Mom gets an obscene phone call, and then while she’s out of the room, a man comes to the door. The daughter won’t let him come in to use the phone, so this plays out much like a hugely effective scene in When A Stranger Call Back. I don’t know where the hell mom is, but it takes her forever to come back, and when she does, despite the creepy call earlier, she’s quite flippant about the daughter overreacting.
Masked crazies eventually infiltrate the house, and this goes into The Strangers territory, with the tense moments inevitably turning into the family being viciously tortured. It’s not excessively gory, but the violence is so perfectly implied that it is still undeniably disturbing. There are even a few nods to the likes of Halloween and Friday the 13th .
The only part that doesn’t do it for me is the “interview” segment that takes up the last 20 minutes of the film and becomes tedious and boring fast.
THE UTAH CABIN MURDERS (2019)
I find it intriguing that Jones decided to explore more than one true-life home invasion story, but it’s odd that in doing so, he simply made a second film that’s a weak, derivative shadow of the first.
Based on a 1990 incident, The Utah Cabin Murders lands on my holiday horror page because it takes place at Christmas. It stars the cute deputy from the first film, who recounts his experience with that case to the sheriff working on this one. Their scenes feature some oddly out of place hints of humor, like a discussion that focuses on heavy metal music.
This is really quite generic and failed to keep me on the edge of my seat. We meet a family celebrating the holidays. The parents are religious, and one daughter’s conversation with her mom about why she despises religion feels quite forced. I guess the aspects touching on faith are supposed to offer more depth to this film than Cabin 28, but the bottom line is that this is still simply about…
…two escaped convicts in masks that show up at the vacation home and terrorize the family while trying to decide who’s going to be their hostage.
There’s just no substance here. It lacks the tense feel of the first film, nothing much happens, and the conclusion is quite anti-climactic.
Even so, me being me, I will so totally check out a third home invasion film based on a true story if Andrew Jones makes one, because I’m a fan of his dedication to horror and appreciate that he keeps working and growing.
