It’s a double dose of female trouble when groups of girls go off the beaten path in these two—one in the tradition of Evil Dead, the other a remake of a 1982 slasher.
HAUNTING AT FOSTER CABIN (aka: Demon Legacy) (2014)
For a majority of its running time, Haunting at Foster Cabin is totally my kind of Evil Dead clone. This time it’s a group of girls heading to a cabin in the woods, and the darkest of the bunch has no problem pointing out the possibilities of an Evil Dead situation.
It’s fun fun fun as they have some secret lesbian encounters, play truth or dare, find a Ouija board, squeeze in a girl punk partying montage, and awaken something in the creepy basement.
These are my kind of demon bitches.
They cackle, they taunt, they do some axe hacking, they fricking run and crawl through the woods in jerky, quick cut motion. There’s gore, some cheesy effects, a hint of humor, and a jump scare that totally got me.
Then the film does something so ridiculous I can’t even comprehend it. During the heat of the horror, veteran actor John Savage is thrown into the film as a hick dude living in a trailer in the woods.
It’s a slap in the face to the final girl as he essentially becomes the “hero” of the film. And yet he completely fails to steal the show or give us a reason to enjoy his unexpected arrival. What a bummer.
UNHINGED (2017)
This remake is just a skeleton of the original 1982 film in terms of plot; so many details have been changed that if it’s been ages since you watched the original, you might not even realize it’s a remake.
A bride to be and her girlfriends are driving to a wedding, have a super frightening encounter on a deserted road, go to extreme lengths to get away, and end up at the house of an odd lady when their car runs out of gas.
Unlike the original, one of the girls conveniently has a freaky mask in her bag, and the girls begin getting stalked and killed by someone wearing the mask and a wedding dress.
I appreciate how many changes there are here, because it offers something different, but the film lacks the superb grit and sense of dread the original delivered—such as the killer POV and constant sound of heavy, pervy breathing. There are plenty of chase scenes, but most of the time the girls just seem to get caught with little thrills or suspense when they easily could have gotten away.
There are even attempts to update the kills—most notably a mean little scene in which the killer ties up one of the girls and mind fucks her by threatening to kill her in a variety of ways.
Since it’s another all-girl movie, there’s lesbian action. I love how all-male getaway movies never have any gay stuff even though men are the ones who can’t keep it in their pants.
There are conveniently placed newspaper clippings to fill in the blanks, the killer inexplicably speaks like a demon (half the time you can’t understand what’s being said), and in a laughable moment, the bride-to-be comes upon the killer in the attic after seeing all her friends killed, and all she can say is, “Is that my dress?”
Most important to note—the remake completely scraps the gender-bending twist from the original.
