Aaron (Matt Schultz) joins his brother Will (Vincent Bombara, Slaughter Drive, Night Zero) and buddy Marcus (Daniel Johnson) for a weekend of camping in the boonies. The trip gets off to an ominous start when Marcus gets into a fight with one of the locals, Jeremy (James Quinn, No Knock List). They meet up with Jordan (Krista Graham) and Casey (Andreas O’Rourke, Gorenos) for what apparently is Will’s stag party. But while they’re drinking and making cringe-worthy toasts, there’s evil afoot in the woods.
The Boonies begins with what seems like a checklist of backwoods horror clichés. A victim tied to their chair at a dinner table while what sounds like the descendent of one of the hillbillies from Deliverance announces “I like this one”. A group of guys from the city stop for food and get into a fight with hostile locals. A couple making out in a parked car gets violently interrupted by masked psychos.
The city folk drive by a suspicious-looking pair of men by the side of the road, but fail to notice the bloody limb sticking out of the back of their truck. But since nobody seems to notice all the folks these psychos have been knocking off I guess we can give these visitors a break.
Eventually, we finally meet Mama Boone (Christine Mancini, Bigfoot the Movie) and are introduced to her sons Jefferson (Blake O’Donnell, Suck Fest) and Cloyd (Ben Dietels, CarousHELL, Amityville Christmas Vacation) and find out they’re not such bad people. She just wants her boys to marry and have families of their own. But one is impotent and the other doesn’t like girls.
It’s like director Lance Parkin and co-writer Matt Schultz spent a weekend watching inbred cannibal films and taking notes. The result is a film so generic about the only cliché The Boonies misses is the black guy doesn’t die first. Although just about everyone in The Boonies is so unlikeable you’ll wish they all could die first. Instead, we get several random victims meeting their maker while the leads get on our nerves. Then when they finally do meet the killers late in the film they’re dispatched with less thought than most of the random victims got until we’re down to the last of the group.
There are plenty of killings, which, if done right might have made The Boonies a bit more interesting. But they’re shot with no flair and there’s no suspense. And the budget apparently didn’t stretch far enough to include effects beyond blood splashing up from just offscreen victims or people slapping a hand over their slit throat so all we see is a little blood.
If ninety minutes of things you’ve seen a hundred times before hung on a plot that consists of coincidences and improbabilities is what you’re looking for, The Boonies is your film. Indican Pictures will give The Boonies a limited theatrical release on March 30th. It hits DVD + Digital on April 13th.