Movie Review: Trailer Park of Terror

Six troubled high school students and their chaperon, an optimistic youth ministries Pastor, return from an outdoor character building retreat in the mountains. During a raging storm their bus crashes, hopelessly stranding them in the middle of nowhere. The hapless group seeks shelter for the night in a seemingly abandoned trailer park they find down the road. However, when the sun sets, it's not refuge they find. Instead, terror finds them in the form of Norma, a damned redneck reaper with a killer body who dispenses vengeance and death aided by her cursed companions, a bloodthirsty brood of Undead trailer trash.

Sound fun right? Too bad it's not really as fun as I'd hoped. I think it starts out with some real promise but goes nowhere fast and lacks any form of originality whatsoever.

It does look really good as it's well shot and edited, plus I think the cast does a great job, especially for a movie of this style as all the acting is pretty good. The lead actress, Nichole Hiltz, is fantastic and is certainly enough eye candy to draw extra attention. She's got a killer bod (get it?). The trailer park residents all do a nice job as well, but the stranded group of kids... not so much. It's not their fault really as they're all given cardboard characters and cliched lines to work with. Country singer Trace Adkins has a fun small part that I'd liked to have seen more of too.

So you get the typical horny, annoying, troubled kids group (who constantly bicker)... lost in a storm... stranded in an a supposedly abandoned place... stalked and killed by some hillbilly zombies who occasionally say funny things... gross-out gore and torture scenes... and that's about it. It's been done for the most part, probably closest to resembling Two Thousand Maniacs but it's got hints of Dead and Breakfast type humor or maybe closer to House of 1000 Corpses as far as the tone goes.

The movie feels very cruel, which makes a lot of the attempted humor miss. I like a good horror/comedy, but if it's so horrific and repulsive as to depress the mood and bring you down, a quick one-liner doesn't really lighten anything up. I know it's supposed to be campy but it's just too sadistic to really accomplish that. Gore hounds should be pleased though, there's lots of it.

One zombie hillbilly plays a guitar and sings a song or 2 and it becomes a bit more entertaining, but in the end I thought it was still just a pretty standard walk-through of exactly what the title of the film promised. Nothing that memorable really. Or at least as forgettable as a trailer park full of redneck zombies can be, that is.

Not an awful film, and you probably know by the cover of the DVD box if you're going to like the movie or not. It's at least well-done, well-acted and loaded with gore. That's about all it's got going for it, but for some people that will be enough. Others will be repulsed. I'm somewhere in-between.

4/10