Small Town Folk is set in England where Jon (Greg Martin) & his wife Susan (Hannah Flint) are driving along on an 'adventure' (this is as much as the film can be bothered to specify or come up with) & come across an area called Grockleton, they quickly become lost & head for Beesley's Manor to ask for a room for the night. It quickly turns out that the landlord (Chris R. Wright) & his brother's are all inbred freaks who like to murder anyone who ends up in Grockleton, obviously Jon & Susan decide leaving is the best course of action but with all the petrol syphoned out of their jeep they don't make it very far. With the inbred mutants right behind them Jon manages to escape but Susan is kidnapped for breeding purposes so the family line of freaks can continue. It's up to Jon to save Susan but he has to come up with a plan first...
This seemingly home-made amateur British production was edited, written, co-produced & directed by Peter Stanley-Ward who also played one of the Scarecrow brother things the same few names keep popping up during the opening & closing credits signifying that a small group of people did multiple jobs to get the thing finished, apparently filmed over a period of four years on a budget of about £4000 which was totally funded by cast & crew you have to admire their determination & commitment but that doesn't guarantee a good film & doesn't mean I want to see any old crap they end up with & certainly doesn't mean they or this rubbishy film is exempt from criticism. First of all the script is just various ideas & themes culled from other much better horror films, it appears that the makers wanted to make a backwoods horror film in the style of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) & Wrong Turn (2003) but only set in England rather than the US & it fails horribly on every count. For a start I assume that the supposed attempts at comedy were intentional but even if they were they are just not funny in the slightest (a crossbow that fires Horse shoes?), the horror is lame with nothing more than the usual slightly mutated dirty freaks chasing a couple of people through some sort of isolated location , there's zero atmosphere or tension as it looks like it was filmed in about three fields (how can you just run into someone who wants to kill you in the middle of an open field exactly?) & the plot is as thin as any film I have watched. Basically a group of killers want to kill a guy & use his wife for breeding purposes (why didn't they use any of the other two young pretty girls killed earlier on?) & that's it, no that really is it as there are no sub-plots or diversions away from this one single plot thread. Boring is the word I would describe Small Town Folk, even at just over 80 minutes it feels like a lot longer & the dialogue is terrible, the character's barely say anything let alone get anything approaching character development & the whole reason Jon & Susan are there in the first place is because they wanted an adventure, yeah right that makes sense.
As often mentioned it seems that Small Town Folk was shot largely against a green-screen & really fake comic book style backgrounds were added in post production & although distinctive it's also distracting & really cheap looking. Apparently Small Town Folk started out as a short feature but grew into a full film & I wonder if the scenes with Jon & Susan (a lot of their scenes are green-screen) were added to bump the time up as the scenes with them & Marcus look & feel different & I am thinking that maybe director Ward started filming with his brother but then expanded things later on. The gore is tame, there's some blood splatter, a few sickles through people's bodies, a stabbing & a decapitation but nothing memorable & the effects are pretty poor. There's no nudity either. The climax seems to rip-off Indiana Jones but with less than a tenth of the excitement (how can Small Town Folk & Indiana Jones get mentioned in the same review?).
Shot here in Hampshire (I've been there...) in the UK the production values are rock bottom with poor effects, bad cinematography (overlit scenes, out of focus scenes...) & a really raw amateur look & feel about the whole thing. The acting is uniformly bad & is Jon really meant to be that laid back or is it simply actor Greg Martin doesn't do emotion of any kind?
Small Town Folk looks like it was an achievement to get made by a group of dedicated & enthusiastic friends but that doesn't meant I want to watch it or want to spend my money on it, lots of films have been made this way before (The Evil Dead (1982), Bad Taste (1987)) & not been this bad. Nice DVD cover, horrible film inside.
This seemingly home-made amateur British production was edited, written, co-produced & directed by Peter Stanley-Ward who also played one of the Scarecrow brother things the same few names keep popping up during the opening & closing credits signifying that a small group of people did multiple jobs to get the thing finished, apparently filmed over a period of four years on a budget of about £4000 which was totally funded by cast & crew you have to admire their determination & commitment but that doesn't guarantee a good film & doesn't mean I want to see any old crap they end up with & certainly doesn't mean they or this rubbishy film is exempt from criticism. First of all the script is just various ideas & themes culled from other much better horror films, it appears that the makers wanted to make a backwoods horror film in the style of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) & Wrong Turn (2003) but only set in England rather than the US & it fails horribly on every count. For a start I assume that the supposed attempts at comedy were intentional but even if they were they are just not funny in the slightest (a crossbow that fires Horse shoes?), the horror is lame with nothing more than the usual slightly mutated dirty freaks chasing a couple of people through some sort of isolated location , there's zero atmosphere or tension as it looks like it was filmed in about three fields (how can you just run into someone who wants to kill you in the middle of an open field exactly?) & the plot is as thin as any film I have watched. Basically a group of killers want to kill a guy & use his wife for breeding purposes (why didn't they use any of the other two young pretty girls killed earlier on?) & that's it, no that really is it as there are no sub-plots or diversions away from this one single plot thread. Boring is the word I would describe Small Town Folk, even at just over 80 minutes it feels like a lot longer & the dialogue is terrible, the character's barely say anything let alone get anything approaching character development & the whole reason Jon & Susan are there in the first place is because they wanted an adventure, yeah right that makes sense.
As often mentioned it seems that Small Town Folk was shot largely against a green-screen & really fake comic book style backgrounds were added in post production & although distinctive it's also distracting & really cheap looking. Apparently Small Town Folk started out as a short feature but grew into a full film & I wonder if the scenes with Jon & Susan (a lot of their scenes are green-screen) were added to bump the time up as the scenes with them & Marcus look & feel different & I am thinking that maybe director Ward started filming with his brother but then expanded things later on. The gore is tame, there's some blood splatter, a few sickles through people's bodies, a stabbing & a decapitation but nothing memorable & the effects are pretty poor. There's no nudity either. The climax seems to rip-off Indiana Jones but with less than a tenth of the excitement (how can Small Town Folk & Indiana Jones get mentioned in the same review?).
Shot here in Hampshire (I've been there...) in the UK the production values are rock bottom with poor effects, bad cinematography (overlit scenes, out of focus scenes...) & a really raw amateur look & feel about the whole thing. The acting is uniformly bad & is Jon really meant to be that laid back or is it simply actor Greg Martin doesn't do emotion of any kind?
Small Town Folk looks like it was an achievement to get made by a group of dedicated & enthusiastic friends but that doesn't meant I want to watch it or want to spend my money on it, lots of films have been made this way before (The Evil Dead (1982), Bad Taste (1987)) & not been this bad. Nice DVD cover, horrible film inside.