That it took three pairs of hands to direct Indican Pictures’ newest horror, 100 Acres Of Hell, serves a bit bewildering for a low budget indie horror. Then again, if genre movies of this kind are more or less your speed, conscionably, you pretty much get what you pay for.
The rule especially goes for fans of wrestling and with Gene Snisky starring, there’s enough fan service here to go around. As for the film, it’s a modest, half-decent effort to level out the spectacle with some caliber of drama, though still a task with a script inherent in its machismo and a round of supporting characters fresh from your dad’s arsenal of bros facing a mid-life crisis.
That’s essentially what’s offered with Snisky as he leads the story Buck, a former wrestler with a seemingly tragic past and an affliction he carries everyday. He groups up with old friends Trent, Bo and Morgan (thus bringing back their old boyband, Buck and the Three Chads!... I’m kidding) and they set out to a long-abandoned hunting ground for a “bro weekend” packed with a plethora of bro-shit.
It takes Buck a while to get into the groove of things their first night out camping while Bo, the horniest of the bunch, struggles to accommodate his on-road invite who mistakenly doesn’t bring as many female friends as he hoped. All that aside, none of them know what they’re in for with a decrepit, raging psychopath on the loose whose folkloric myth usually serves to ward off anyone looking for the hunting ground.
Alas, not tonight. There’s a killer on the loose. He’s ugly as fuck, he’s fierce, he’s deadly, and he’s been around since before Nixon’s resignation. He also has a thirst to kill, and all caution be damned, his latest victims are right on task.
The killer’s bailiwick is all about brutalizing men and collecting their corpses, as well as holding women captive and hostage, and with each person missing one by one, the next 24 hours will decide who lives, who dies, and the fate of the very killer whose legend has terrorized many a geriatic roadside bartender miles away from the area.
Buck’s backstory is almost entirely wasted on its misguided ambiguity, and ends up feeling like a throwaway footnote toward the end. It’s half-cocked in its non-conclusiveness leading up to the cliffhanger ending in which, SURPRISE!…a plot twist all but undoes any earlier notions you might have had about the story altogether.
Come for the gore, stay for the ghoulishness and whatever intrigue there is to take, but don’t expect this latest thrill to elevate the genre in any sort of way. Despite the wasted potential to be something more cinematically muscular, 100 Acres Of Hell plays out more like 80 minutes of perfunction.