Two backwoods horror flicks to leave you scarred and plank faced

A seemingly cheesy indie slasher gets brutal, and a seemingly brutal backwoods horror gets too disturbing for my fragile male ego to handle.

SCARRED (2013)

Although I haven’t seen Lady Krampus as of this writing, having already blogged about Hellweek and Voodoo Rising, I’d say Scarred is indie director Eddie Lengyel’s strongest flick yet. Hard to believe this one came out before Voodoo Rising, because it kind of blows that one away.

The one thing you need to know before getting into it is that you have to put up with the b-movie slasher feel of the first part of the film. There’s lots of hokey dialogue as models are assembled by an agency and sent to a location shoot in the woods with a small crew.

There’s an early kill of a chick on a car hood to introduce us to the vicious masked backwoods killer, an awesome pop rock tune during the opening credits/model montage, the introduction of the weird couple that runs the place at which the models are staying, and the presentation of their odd little daughter’s obsession with a legendary killer they forbid her to talk about.

Then in comes Ari Lehman – original drowning Jason Voorhees –in a cameo as a local who tells the models the legend of the killer around a campfire.

Considering this is a big, menacing old school killing machine with absolutely no “personality,” who better?

And then the slaughter begins. Scarred has some great hardcore kill scenes, with no CGI crap. You can also expect to see some nasty pain inflicted on those the killer hates the most.

Plus, rather than the usual pretty boy hero, our “final guy” is a cub with a sense of humor. He manages to stand out and steal the show more in the final act than he does earlier in the film.

PLANK FACE (2016)

Few horror directors these days can make me go into a movie with a pit in my stomach like Scott Schirmer (Harvest Lake, Found). He has the ability to go to all the places I really don’t want to go when it comes to combining horror and sex. Unfortunately, he manages to make me feel so uncomfortable so damn well that I keep coming back for more.

With Plank Face, Schirmer begins by pretty much showing other indie directors how fricking simple it is to make a kick ass intro kill scene to a simple backwoods slasher, complete with girl tits, man ass, and a killer. But the real kick in the face? This isn’t a simple backwoods slasher.

A pretty couple heads into the woods for some weekend camping. When a fricking hillbilly tries to force himself on the girlfriend, nothing is as it seems, and just when you think the boyfriend is really going to teach this hillbilly a lesson…

You end up with a movie that is a fuck you to every straight male viewer that has ever gotten off on every misogynistic moment of every horror movie ever made that put women through some of the most vile, violating experiences imaginable.

Plank Face is a movie about three primitive backwoods women – a senior lady, a pretty younger woman, and a woman hidden behind a bunny mask – that abduct the boyfriend and begin a horrific process of making him one of them.

Torturing him, raping him daily, forcing him to take part in cannibalism, affixing a permanent wooden mask to his face…

I couldn’t stop squirming in my seat as I watched this young man being physically and mentally broken.

I was terrified, repulsed, devastated, and heartbroken at the hopelessness of his situation. And the things he was made to witness and do…

Scott Schirmer has done it again. He has destroyed my faith in humanity and torn out my soul and stomped all over it, leaving me an empty shell of nothingness. Holy shit, he’s a genius. He has made me…Plank Face.