Satan's Playground (2006) Reviews

• Proof that the D horror film industry feeds off of itself

  eyecandyforu2009-06-07

  Fangoria gives Satan's Playground 3 1/2 stars. Fangoria creates a buzz and excitement, the cast and crew will be at their convention! Fangoria charges admission to sit and listen to cast and crew discuss Satan's Playground. Quite a little racket. Sub-level horror filmmakers seem stuck in an almost raptured love of 70's and 80's Exploitation/Slasher horror. Certainly no masterpieces themselves they still have a sentimental place in the heart of horror fans who grew up being scared by them. These films marked a milestone in the genre, shockers for the time, I'm sure those iconic directors never imagined they would be copied, and copied...and copied. Nothing about this film is original. In fact, it's such a tacky copy of a combination of much earlier films that rather than being an homage, it insults the originals by claiming it's something new. The plot is so typical, so (I SWORE I wouldn't write it but I have to) cliché, yet without any merit or reason. A family is stranded in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. One by one they wander off and are poorly dispatched by the obligatory crazy family who look like they're taking a break from a really bad community haunted house. UGH, just writing that makes me mad. The director rips off film shots and styles relentlessly. Rushing cameras follow the "girl in peril" as she screams her head off through the woods. The camera rushes up to a front door for no reason. A snake is placed on a table and reacts on cue for no reason. The timing and plot devices are disastrous. Then there is the acting. The lead female looks way too young for her part. The biggest twist was when I discovered she was married to the older man and had an EIGHTEEN YEAR OLD SON. No one in the film is in the least bit attractive, a must for bad horror. The old hag woman coasts along on her appearance alone, which is so...copied. At least give us something soft to rest our eyes on. Ugh,mad again. The most cardinal sin in my humble opinion is you can't even laugh at it. If you're not going to scare or disturb at least entertain. I hope I never find out how much the budget was for this pile, because if it was fifty cents it was too much. The DVD should come with a full rebate. I watched this on Netflix instant play mainly because I have an exact replica of the door knocker that's in the poster art. It's a nice door knocker, wrought iron and well made. I can't bring myself to display it though, not because I think it's creepy in any way (which it isn't) but because it's just SO tacky. It figures prominently in this. Yes, it's very, very tacky. Fans turn to horror reviewers because they want to know if a film is worth buying. We expect honesty, not shilling for profit or nepotism. Being this off base is infuriating. Fangoria should be ashamed of itself.

• No thanks

  kornsme1822006-09-08

  I consider myself a fan of Mr. Dante as a writer and director. I enjoyed both desecration and Horror. Did they have good acting? Not really. Were they scary? Desecration had some creepy parts, but overall no. So why did I like these movies? because they were surreal. They were on crack and they knew it. This is what made the movies enjoyable to watch. Satan's playground is much more straight forward and this leaves all of Dante's bad dialogue and bad actors nowhere to hide. The movie isn't scary. There is only one really moment of gore. This movie is just plain bad. The married couple in the film look like father and daughter and I thought they were for the first half hour.

• Horrible film...insults the true adult horror fans intelligence

  fyrekracker2006-10-13

  I am tired of wasting my time with pathetic horror. The worst acting you've ever seen, and you immediately hope all of the main characters die soon.The movie had just started when you get the "Did you hear that?" line. Oh my God...I have finally realized that there is no American horror any more. The production value is castrated by amateurish acting. American horror needs something other than "a band of crazies out in the wilderness terrorizing a family." The emphasis on the Home Depot "scary" door knocker is totally laughable. The only redeeming factor is a trailer for Evil Dead, which is a much better film.I stopped this one fast and sailed it across the room.

• Inept continuity and infuriatingly stupid characters sink it.

  capkronos2010-04-02

  This movie tries to blend ideas from several cult horror flicks from the 70s and 80s but fails rather miserably at pulling it all off. A grating Italian-American family consisting of husband Frank (Salvatore Paul Piro), wife Donna (Felissa Rose, of SLEEPAWAY CAMP fame), their mentally-retarded son Sean (Danny Lopes), Donna's sister Paula (Ellen Sandweiss) and Paula's infant son Anthony (Marco Rose) are headed somewhere in their station wagon and decide to take a short cut through the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Their car gets stuck in some mud, Frank decides to walk off somewhere to get help and ends up stumbling upon a creepy old house inhabited by an elderly palm reader named Mrs. Leeds (Irma St. Paule). Mrs. Leeds claims to have thirteen children, but only two of them - Boy (Edwin Neal) and Judy (Christie Sanford) - still live with her. All three of them turn out to be psychotic. They kill Frank and then set their sites on the rest of the family; basically killing anyone else who happens to wander into their path. Oh yeah, and there's also some kind of creature ("The Jersey Devil") flying around in the woods killing people that we never actually get to see. The director has no problem citing his two primary sources; the POV floating-through-the-woods camera-work of THE EVIL DEAD (1981) and the warped backwoods family of THE T EXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974), here. Sandweiss naturally co-starred in the former; Neal in the latter. The character of Judy - a childish, deranged adult woman in pigtails who seems obsessed with babies - was copied directly from the so-so A MERICAN Gothic (1987). There are references to other horror films here too, if you want to look for them. What I had a major problem with was how moronic the characters were. Not only are they unlikable, they do one stupid thing after another throughout the movie. Some of the things that occur over the course of this film make absolutely no sense. And no, I'm not stupid enough to buy into the supposed "abstract nightmare logic" some people claim this movie has. Stupid is stupid. At one point, a policeman shows up at the sinister home to investigate. Ms. Leeds tells him that muffled screams he's hearing from the basement are a cat, so he just leaves (!), goes back to his car and is killed by the invisible flying monster thingy. The next shot reveals that the police car is parked within just a few feet of the stranded family's car... which two of the characters are still sleeping in! So let me get this straight. The policemen sees a car parked in the middle of the road but doesn't even check on it? And the people inside the car don't hear him driving up the road, see his lights or hear him pulling up. And they don't hear him screaming when he's being killed? "Nightmare logic" or pure idiocy? You be the judge. One of the characters survives the night and ends up in the safety of a hospital to recount the tale to police. So what happens next? Does the policeman do what all other policemen on the planet would do when faced with a potential massacre and organize a heavily-armed posse to raid the home? Nope! He just drags the survivor back to the house of horrors all by himself with no backup whatsoever. And the two examples listed above are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to "Yeah... right" moments. The locations are decent and the director throws in a couple of nicely-composed shots here and there (though the overdone POV shots get old after awhile). There's also a corker of a gore scene where a guy has throat cut and blood gushes out all over the place. Other than that, I didn't really care for this. The acting isn't very good, the characters are dull and moronic and the plot line is a nonsensical mess. I found myself more annoyed than entertained.

• Tomaselli misses the mark...again

  lovecraft2312006-08-22

  Dante Tomaselli, while obviously a big horror fan, still has yet to make a good horror movie. His latest, "Satan's Playground", while better than his previous genre venture "Horror", still isn't any good. The plot: A generally unlikeable family (which includes "Sleepaway Camp" star Felicia Rose and "Evil Dead" girl Elen Sandweiss) find themselves trapped in the woods of Jersey. They run into another small family, this one (obviously) made up of psychopaths. Oh, and there's the Jersey Devil. Throughout the movie (and in it's commentary), Tomaselli talks a lot about "nightmare logic" and so forth. While such a thing worked for directors like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, here is backfires on Tomaselli. This actually seems to be one of the biggest problems with his movies: he has no idea how to correctly tell a story, or make anything remotely scary. Sure, there is some bloodshed (including an awesome slit throat), some bludgeoning, Satan worshipers, and other things, but it just feels tacked on, as if he thought throwing things in randomly (the Satan worshipers sub-plot goes nowhere, and is unneeded) will make it scary. Unfortunately, he seems to forget that things such as atmosphere and dread are what made so many of the movies he loves memorable, thus making the whole movie feel unnecessary and contrived. Maybe next time, he will manage to hit a home run. Until then, it seem's poor Dante will continue to make uninvolved, senseless horror without a point or a scare in tact.