Plot
Six trouble high school students and
their youth ministries pastor are on their way back from an outdoor retreat
in the mountains when their bus crashes during a storm. Stranded in the
middle of nowhere, the group seeks refuge at a seemingly abandoned trailer
park. However this trailer park is home to a group of redneck zombies led by
Norma, a buxom blonde who struck a deal with the Devil when her lover boy
was killed by jealous suitors in the park.
Review
With a title like Trailer Park of
Terror, it doesn't take a genius to realise that it's not going to be
the most pretty, tactful and thought-provoking film out there. You're going
to get sleaze, filth and as much stereotyping as you can shake a stick at.
Combine Two Thousand Maniacs! with John Waters' legendary filthy
classic Pink Flamingos and throw in Rob Zombie's penchant for white
trash cinema and you've got some idea of what to expect.
With a morbid sense of humour, a "middle finger approach" to taste and more
depraved cruelty than any man is fit to watch in 91 minutes, Trailer Park
of Terror means well and plays well for the most part.
The film opens with the back story about Norma
and how the zombies came to be which is all well and good given that she
spends her first few minutes wearing just a bra. I'm not American so don't
exactly get the whole "redneck" thing but the way the films portray them as
backwoods, inbred, retarded and perverted is just a little too clichéd now.
I'm sure they're all nice people really but you wouldn't think it should you
ever watch a horror film. Then the film switches to the present day to give
us our band of travelling zombie chow in their bus. The characters are,
surprise surprise, of the stock variety and are so one-dimensional that
labelling them as token slut, token goth and token asshole is actually quite
demeaning to the word token. Their obligatory opening words are all filled
with sarcastic barbs, designed to give us an immediate insight into their
minds. The film knows that characters aren't going to matter too much later
on and these scenes are kept mercifully brief but the problem is that the
redneck zombies don't appear until the half-way point so you had better get
sitting comfortably. When they do finally appear, the zombies look as good as
they have any right to be. Some of them clearly are just wearing masks but
the make-up jobs on a few of them look top drawer. They've all got a nice
80s-vibe to them akin to the likes of Night of the Demons and
Return of the Living Dead. They've got a lot of cheesy one-liners too
and they all ham it up to immense levels. The pot-smoking country
music-loving zombie is the funniest of the group, belting out a few musical
numbers from the top of his trailer. It's all silly and jokey but it's
clearly just padding out the running time a little more in between attacks.
And it really gets on your nerves after the first couple of songs!
The goofy sense of fun and
mischievousness that the film toys with is brutally cast aside during the
scenes of cruelty and torture. These zombies don't just want to get your
brains, they want to chop off your arms, smash through your spinal column
and turn you into beef jerky. This beef jerky scene alone is nasty, as one
unlucky teenager is slowly peeled before being dunked into a bathtub of
boiling oil. The scene feels like it goes on forever, such is the nauseating
way the victim is slowly toyed with. They could have just dunked him into
the oil but no, this is a 2008 horror film so that means excess is the key
and torture is necessary. The "less is more" strategy of yesteryear has been
replaced by "show everything and string it out for as long you can."
With the film being as hokey and cheesy as it had been up until this point,
this scene seems a little out of place. But that seems like an overriding
problem with the film. It's played too over-the-top for anything to be taken
seriously so when there's an effective moment, it's all lost in the
goofiness.
Verdict
Trailer Park of Terror
is daft, silly and
extremely cheesy which is fun at times and pretty cringe-worthy at others.
Whether you like this or not will really depend on your mood. It's that type
of film. Just make sure you have a good wash afterwards as this film will
make you feel dirty!
