Caught this on Tubi, while playing "Tubi roulette" (where I browse to the horror section, close my eyes, scroll, and randomly pick) and assumed the worst, because, well... that's the case more often than not. So to be fair, my expectations were low, but I was happily surprised. It was actually pretty decent.
I mean, it's not reinventing the wheel. Nothing real new or wild. It's a teen-something slasher where the kids are picked off one by one, until the killer and their motives are revealed at the end. Pretty standard stuff. But down competently. And right off the bat I was on board just because of the setting.
This movie is set at a seasonal haunt known as the titular "Haunted Trail", which seems to be a combination of multiple standard haunted house/maze sections, combined with outdoor haunted trail sections in between each maze. A group of friends arrive, in a few different groups, with plans to meet there, which automatically gives the movie license to have different groups to be attacked without the other immediately realizing the danger. There are also some rivalries, and romantic triangles going on within the group, which adds flavor to the characters, but is thankfully light enough to not bog things down for long. They are also mostly African American characters in this group of friends, so it's a nice change of pace from the standard makeup of most of these generic teens in your average slasher movie, and the dialogue feels like a lot of it was improvised to come off more natural, and genuine than the stiff generic dialogue a lot of slashers seem to employ. I appreciated that. Because of this, the acting is pretty decent and believable.
The set and props were also surprisingly good. Everything looked pretty genuine to the setting, and the lighting and cinematography was also surprisingly well done. To be honest, the only real letdown for me was that the kills were very tame, and mostly occurred off screen. And the ones that didn't were pretty mediocre. Not a ton was spent on that, obviously. That and the killers motivation seemed to make no sense. I won't spoil anything, but you have to question why, if someone sensed to focus their ire on a single individual, why they would go through this elaborate of a scheme, and kill so many other people pointlessly. Also, if their plan had succeeded, their goal would have still failed because the people that they killed were needed to make the killer successful in the future, so they just doomed their own goals by killing them
Anyway, decent movie, with a "huh?" ending, plot holes, and weak kills, but despite all that, still well worth watching.
I mean, it's not reinventing the wheel. Nothing real new or wild. It's a teen-something slasher where the kids are picked off one by one, until the killer and their motives are revealed at the end. Pretty standard stuff. But down competently. And right off the bat I was on board just because of the setting.
This movie is set at a seasonal haunt known as the titular "Haunted Trail", which seems to be a combination of multiple standard haunted house/maze sections, combined with outdoor haunted trail sections in between each maze. A group of friends arrive, in a few different groups, with plans to meet there, which automatically gives the movie license to have different groups to be attacked without the other immediately realizing the danger. There are also some rivalries, and romantic triangles going on within the group, which adds flavor to the characters, but is thankfully light enough to not bog things down for long. They are also mostly African American characters in this group of friends, so it's a nice change of pace from the standard makeup of most of these generic teens in your average slasher movie, and the dialogue feels like a lot of it was improvised to come off more natural, and genuine than the stiff generic dialogue a lot of slashers seem to employ. I appreciated that. Because of this, the acting is pretty decent and believable.
The set and props were also surprisingly good. Everything looked pretty genuine to the setting, and the lighting and cinematography was also surprisingly well done. To be honest, the only real letdown for me was that the kills were very tame, and mostly occurred off screen. And the ones that didn't were pretty mediocre. Not a ton was spent on that, obviously. That and the killers motivation seemed to make no sense. I won't spoil anything, but you have to question why, if someone sensed to focus their ire on a single individual, why they would go through this elaborate of a scheme, and kill so many other people pointlessly. Also, if their plan had succeeded, their goal would have still failed because the people that they killed were needed to make the killer successful in the future, so they just doomed their own goals by killing them
Anyway, decent movie, with a "huh?" ending, plot holes, and weak kills, but despite all that, still well worth watching.