Do
you ever get irritated with helpless, insufficiently proactive horror movie
characters? Sure, we all do. Happily, John Crenshaw is cut from an entirely
different cloth. This former Navy SEAL is nobody’s victim. Finally, a colony of
radioactively mutated genetic freaks has a real fight on their hands in Jared
Cohn’s The Horde (trailer here), which releases
today on VOD.
Crenshaw
has reluctantly agreed to accompany his girlfriend Selina Duboix and her high
school photography class on their extra credit camping trip. They will be
minding a real horror movie mix of kids, including the hot-and-heavy couple in
the backseat, potential final girl Hailey Summers, and the entitled Riley St.
Claire, who is so obnoxious, we will probably be okay if he meets a gruesome
end.
Of
course, the inbred mutants will duly attack after dark, but they are led by the
suspiciously healthy-looking Cylus Atkinson and his partner. They might not be
from around these parts, but they are still psychotic. During the melee,
Crenshaw gets pulled fairly far afield, which allows Atkinson and his
knuckle-draggers to capture Duboix and whichever kids are still alive. However,
Crenshaw is quickly back in the game, picking off the mutants one-by-one.
The
whole concept underlying The Horde is
simple but massively potent. It is exactly what fans always long to see when they
mistakenly start watching some sort of sadistic torture porn. Unfortunately,
Cohn allows the deviants far too much free time with their captives before
Crenshaw starts rocking their world. Some of those scenes just excessively
painful to watch. However, it certainly makes the retribution cathartic. Cohn
and screenwriter-star Paul Logan do not betray viewers with a screw-you ending
either. If you are in the mood for some vicarious payback, you have come to the
right place.
As
Crenshaw, Logan has obvious skills and surprising screen presence. He also develops
some rather nice chemistry with Tiffany Brouwer’s Duboix. We’d like to see
these folks stay together. Genre veteran Costas Mandylor snarls and chews the
scenery like a pro, while another horror movie veteran’s early and rather innocuous
appearance essentially screams for a darker third act return.
