Pinocchio's Revenge (USA, 1996)

(Spoilers) A mildly interesting but ultimately failed low-budget horror movie written and directed by independent filmmaker Kevin Tenney, who once upon a time turned out a relatively steady stream of great to crappy genre flotsam — his first two feature films, the original Night of the Demons (1988 / trailer) and Witchboard (1986 / trailer), being the most popular — before pretty much fading from the scene. (He does, however, presently have a few projects — Don't Let Them In and Sins of 7 — in development hell.) 

According to the interview with him conducted Jo Blo in 2021, Tenney's original title for the direct-to-video project was The Pinocchio Syndrome, which perhaps makes a bit more sense than the title ultimately foisted by Trimark, Pinocchio's Revenge, especially since Pinocchio never takes revenge for anything. But whether The Pinocchio Syndrome or Pinocchio's Revenge, the movie falls flatly in the middle of the genre known as the killer-doll genre... or does it?

Trailer to

Pinocchio's Revenge:

The basic narrative of this semi-killer doll flick involves a total MILF public defender and single mom named Jennifer Garrick (Rosalind Allen of Ticks [1993 / trailer], Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice [1992 / trailer] and Son of Darkness [1991 / trailer]) who ends up in possession of the Pinocchio puppet of a convicted serial killer, Vincent Gotto (Lewis Van Bergen [9 Nov 1938 – Apr 2018] of The Relic [1997 / trailer], the mess that is Moon in Scorpio [1987 / trailer], and Savage Dawn [1985 / trailer with Richard Lynch]). The puppet finds its way into the hands of her annoying ringlet-haired daughter Zoe (Brittany Alyse Smith*), and suddenly accidents start happening...

* Tenney may have nothing but nice words for his child actress, but there is a reason why her career petered out so quickly: she's a horrible actress. Currently, the now generically hot blonde appears to be attempting to ignite a singing career. 

Brittany Alyse Smith's

Karma's A Bitch:

As you can tell, the story ain't new. Unluckily, it is also not that well presented, either. The camerawork is good enough, but the plot is padded with characters that go nowhere (the whole bit with the priest [Michael Connors of Roommate Wanted (2020 / trailer)] is wasted time and padding that would have been better served with setting up and having another victim), the narrative has some pretty big holes in it, the acting in immensely uneven, as a whole the movie is neither all that scary nor tense and, ultimately, the twist is too big for its britches and arguably fails to hold water. Tenney obviously wanted his cake and to eat it, too: aiming for psychological ambiguity within the realm of cheesy killer-doll exploitation horror, neither aspect is fully committed to and, thus, everything seems watered down and weak. 

In regards to cheesy killer-doll exploitation horror, we of course have the killer puppet and diverse scenes that seemingly prove that it truly is mobile and killer — during the "big" final showdown, Jennifer even sees flashes of him as he attempts to kill her. The movie goes far enough to commit itself to it exploitation roots by including a mildly gratuitous sex scene between Jennifer and her too-good-to-be-true beau David (Todd Allen of Django Unchained [2012 / trailer], Tycus [1999 / trailer], both Witchboard [1986 / trailer] and Witchboard II [1993 / trailer], and Silverado [1985 / trailer]) as well as a truly gratuitous but immensely enjoyable nude shower scene in which Jennifer's truly attractive live-in au pair Sophia (Candace McKenzie*) displays the full monty.

* Candace is a writer now... or at least she wrote once upon a time. 

But then, as per the psychological aspect of the narrative, we also have scenes that indicate that the doll is little more than a doll, and that it is the young daughter that might actually be giving in to her darker impulses. Is killer Pinocchio perhaps nothing more than the projected "truth" of an imbalanced, angry child; of a psychopath hiding behind princess curls? Jennifer doesn't think so, and even flirts enough with the idea of "evil existing" that one could think an exorcism scene was planned but got cut. The movie, in any event, refuses to commit itself 100% to any of the concepts. And that is perhaps one of the biggest annoyances about the movie.

One could argue that the narrative is that as from the viewpoint of an unreliable narrator: that we are seeing everything as they see it and not as it actually happened — as in, most recently for us, the watchable Australian psychological horror thriller Run Rabbit Run (2024 / trailer). But certain events, like Pinocchio's apparent ability to teleport into the back seat of Mommy Jennifer's car the fateful day she brings it home, occur outside of the unreliable narrator's viewpoint, thus inferring that the puppet either does indeed have a life of its own or is a conduit of evil ala Annabelle (2014 / trailer). Later sudden appearances at the side of Zoe's bed or in Sophia's room can be read either way, of course, but the question does arise at the end: Where has Pinocchio gone?

 

Even for its day, and unlike its nudity quotient, Pinocchio's Revenge has an amazingly low bodycount for flicks of its ilk — jeez, even the bratty little girl (Tara Hartman) who terrorizes Zoe at school survives! Excluding the dead son of Vincent, who is already dead when the movie starts, we get an oddly unconvincing prison execution and a lot of exposition before the two characters that have "I'm going to Die!" written on their forehead do exactly that — but then, it isn't exactly as if the movie has a surplus of characters. (Still, it wouldn't have been all that hard to write in the death of the pointless priest.)

Tenney was obviously trying to do something a little different than normal for D2V horror with Pinocchio's Revenge, but unluckily nothing gels well enough make the movie anything more than mildly interesting in a TV horror movie way. You don't have to search this one out, but if it falls in your lap and you have nothing better to watch, you can give it a go.

Dead Zone (USA, 2022)

Not to be mistaken David Cronenberg's Dead Zone (1983 / trailer), from so long ago that no one really remembers it. This Dead Zone was initially broadcast on Tubi in the US and then released as a cutout DVD in Europe. It is, in all truth, pretty stupid in almost every way, but, oddly enough, also far more enjoyable than it has the right to be. Regional genre filmmaker Hank Braxtan (of Chemical Peel [2014 / trailer] Unnatural [2015 / trailer], Snake Outa Compton [2018 / trailer], Jurassic Hunt [2021 / trailer], Dragon Soldiers [2020 / trailer] and Glowzies [2023 / trailer]) won't win any prizes for his overly direct and unadorned style, but he does a good job with his actors and manages to wrought the little he has into an oddly satisfying if overly familiar (and ultimately inane and forgettable) slab of virile action.

Supposedly it took four guys — Michael Lurie and Jeffrey Giles wrote the story, while Michael Klug and Tim Ogletree did the screenplay — to scribble the script to this masculine but mindless B-movie, but one gets the feeling that all four spent more time cracking open the brews than they did putting any effort into the narrative. One wonders that any of them managed to see far enough over the rim of their cans to allow a little estrogen into the story, in the form of a female character, Goodman (Whitney Nielsen of Behemoth [2021 / trailer], Alien Expedition [2018 / trailer] and Mercy Christmas [2017 / trailer]), who unexpectedly pops up midway... The general feeling conveyed is that the part was first written for a man (Dead Zone is, after all, a really manly flick) and then, suddenly, suffering a brief flash of woke guilt, they decided to give the character breasts and a vagina. (None of which you ever see on screen.) 

Trailer to

Dead Zone: 

The headlining stars are, of course, Michael Jai White, Chad Michael Collins and Jeff Fahey, but as any regular viewer of D2DVD-worthy movies knows and expects, Jeff Fahey* (of Psycho III [1986 / trailer], Corpses [2004], Planet Terror [2007] and so much more) is around just long enough to do about a day's worth of shooting and collect his check. In other words, probably not even five minutes screentime: just long enough to explain the mission to the film's elite team of brawny soldiers, send them off, smile, walk off screen, and never be seen again.

* Fahey is not known to say "No" to a job, and has never been a favorite here at a wasted life, but he's definitely an actor that has gotten better with age. Nowadays he comes across as a true thespian even when sleepwalking or in parts not half as small as this one. To get an idea of how much he's improved — or, perhaps, to see how bad he used to be — give his 1995 fiasco The Lawnmower Man (1992 / trailer) a gander.

 

And what a muscular, strapping, cis-gender team of mostly six-packed young DILFs the elite soldiers are! The oldest is probably BBC team leader Boss (Michael Jai White of Spawn [1997], Black Dynamite [2009 / trailer], Black Friday [2021 / trailer] and so much more), who can save us any time he wants: the singular man on the cusp of GILFiness, he not only can still kick martial arts ass but has a killer smile and fantasy-worthy bod. (But then, so do all the men in this flick; the only thing that varies is the size of their biceps, chests and, probably, the weapons they never show.) His virile team of red-blooded expendables — come on, you know that's what teams in movies like this are: fodder waiting to die — are the strapping fellow BBC Ton (Antuone Torbert of Karate Kill [2016 / trailer]), the slimly sturdy and dreamy-eyed Danner (Tarkin Dospil), and the robust redneck-looking Sinclair (J. Michael Weiss, who always seems to play characters that die early). They get joined by the cocksure Ajax (Chad Michael Collins, he with the oddly untrustworthy smirk, of Legion of the Dead [2005 / trailer], Room 33 [2009 / trailer] and Howlers [2019 / trailer]), whose past beef with Boss gets settled in a properly macho, two-fisted way and then they are reliable best buds again — nothing like a respectable fistfight to get old scores off the table. (It's a bit of a shame that they didn't top that scene off with them comparing sizes.)

Dead Zone is nominally a zombie movie, but barely. The future present in which the film is set is one in which a zombie virus has long broken out, resulting in big swathes of the country (now radioactive due to bombing) being quarantined. Damn if a possible vaccine wasn't left behind in a lab in the titular "Dead Zone" (which, oddly enough, still has electricity), so our elite team gets sent in wearing high-tech armor — a shame they didn't also get high-tech weapons — to retrieve the serum. But although fast zombies do pop up now and then, the true danger is a man in a rubber suit, a mutated blood-sucking humanoid creature (James Markham Hall Jr. of Laguna Ave [2021 / trailer]) with a long, blood-sucking tongue (we're talking tentacle-porn length).

 

The script is grunt-level intelligent and holds water about as good as a popped condom, but Dead Zone isn't out to be intelligent: it aims to offer some hardy, two-fisted entertainment for guys that want to zone out and relax in front of the tube. In that sense, the movie works perfectly: if you are not one to be bothered by stupidity — most men are not, as is evidenced by our tendency to go for airheadednness — Dead Zone is truly a slab of agreeable if unimaginative celluloid testosterone. The hunky, elite team has good chemistry, and the video-game level CGI is oddly appropriate to the video-game narrative. The last barrels single-mindedly ahead without thinking once about anything, sort of like beer-drinking men on the way to the toilet during a piss pause.

 

Okay, the black-op suits the team wear are slightly annoying, as they make the individual men pretty indistinguishable (Iron Man-like POV shots are continually edited in to clarify who's doing what or what's happening to whom), and there is a bit too much pointless walking around. But that said, on the whole Dead Zone works for what it is: an obviously low budget, blatantly brainless but brawny B-movie. (To its advantage, that is also all it sets out to be.)

About the only thing that would have truly made Dead Zone better is copious amounts of gratuitous nudity, but, as we all know, those days are long over.

Frogs (USA, 1972)

"Well, it seems like everyone in our family is hung-up on frogs."
Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke)

 

An amazing movie, if you get down to it: this nature-gone-mad eco-horror movie not only evidences a notable lack of directorial talent, thespian ability and narrative skill, but is also oddly boring and padded and without any truly convincing action — BUT: it is also amazingly riveting and fun and watchable. It is truly a tangible example of dichotomy at work, and deserves its reputation as one of the worst watchable movies ever made.

Trailer to

Frogs (1972):

Alone in the opening scenes, as we watch mustacheless nature photographer Pickett Smith (Katherine Ross's husband Sam Elliott of The Man Who Killed Hitler and then Bigfoot [2018 / trailer], Ghost Rider (2007 / trailer), Tombstone [1993 / trailer] and so much more) paddle through the swamps taking photographs nature and pollution, we already know that the production is going to be lacking: Italy-born cinematographer Mario Tosi* (11 May 1935 – 11 Nov 2021) has notable difficulty at keeping the shot in focus. Luckily his ability to focus does improve, even if his camerawork is pretty generic and not much better than that found in an assembly-line TV movie. 

* Mario Tosi, who started his career lensing things like Sinderella and the Golden Bra (1964 / movie in 5 minutes) and How to Succeed with Girls (1964 / full movie) before working himself up to movies like Swamp Country (1966, with R.G. Armstrong) and the ridiculously bad Terror in the Jungle (1968 / music) and Frogs, eventually went on to do better jobs on better movies, like Buster and Billie (1974 / trailer) and Carrie (1976 / trailer). He was also a painter; an example of his work is directly below.

The script for Frogs comes from the hands of Robert Hutchison and Robert Blees (9 Jun 1918 – 31 Jan 2015), the latter of whom was an industry stalwart whose low-brow credits go back to Sweater Girl (1942 / full film) and who had highlights like Who Slew Auntie Roo? (1972 / trailer, co-scribed with Jimmy Sangster) and Robert Fuest's classic Dr Phibes Rises Again (1972 / trailer), but the uncomplicated script to Frogs is pretty underdeveloped, illogical and populated above all by stereotypes and ciphers.

Strangely enough, for a nature-takes-revenge movie titled Frogs, the story never actually sees the frogs do anything but hop about or watch or croak, leaving the various rather incompetently staged deaths to snakes, lizards and salamanders, gators, turtles and crabs, tarantulas and, unbelievably enough, apparently sentient Spanish moss. The scriptwriters, not to mention those who greenlighted the script, had to have been stoned to think that what they had written was in any way fit to be filmed.

Not that the plot is all that complicated: on the family mansion on the private island of the filthy rich Crockett family, where the various mostly less-than-likeable and definitely not environmentally conscious family members and hanger-ons have gathered for the annual birthday celebration of the clan's unpleasant patriarch Jason (Ray Milland [3 Jan 1907 – 10 Marc 1986] of The Swiss Conspiracy [1976]), nature suddenly starts doing away with one person after the other. Not exactly a plotline that requires a lot of creativity, but one that could offer a lot of possibilities — all of which are squandered by the slumming scriptwriters.

American poster by Diener-Hauser 

* Milland, an actor whose main concern was generally money and not quality, followed his star turn in Frogs with the even more reviled Thing with Two Heads (1972 / trailer). Oddly enough, one of his most WTF movies, the ridiculously entertaining Old Dark House thriller The House in Nightmare Park (1973 / trailer below), has become virtually forgotten by now.

Trailer —

The House in Nightmare Park (1973):

The lack of talent that the script seems to evidence, unbelievably enough, is truly outdone by the incompetence and directorial inability displayed by the movie's spectacularly untalented director, the busy TV auteur George McCowan* (27 Jun 1927 – 1 Nov 1995). He fails to bring any sense of urgency to this rather bloodless and not very violent GP movie, and any suspense that builds is intermittent — as in only when a character wanders away to be killed — and of the kind that draws laughter instead of clenched teeth.

McCowan and his scriptwriters pad the movie with innumerable shots of thousands of the titular creatures (though most look more like toads than frogs), which helps puff the movie to feature-film length but never manages to make the creatures threatening. Careless to the point of obviously not caring at all — for example: the first dead guy, Grover, is not only one of the Breathing Dead but also opens his eyes from one shot to the other — McCowan almost succeeds in getting a terrible performance from his entire cast, but both Sam Elliot and Judy "Black Barbie" Pace** foil him there.

 

* Aside from Frogs, McCowan directed around nine feature films during his career, none of which are as memorable as this disasterpiece. He killed the Magnificent Seven franchise with the flop that was The Magnificent Seven Ride! (1972 / trailer), made the shot-on-video and virtually unseen paranoia thriller To Kill the King (1974, with Susan Tyrrell), helped destroy Jan-Michael Vincent's career with Shadow of the Hawk (1976 / trailer), and subsequently crowned his lackluster career with the psychotronically terrible but fun Shape of Things to Come (1979 / trailer).

 

** The beautiful Judy Pace (of 13 Frightened Girls [1963 / trailer], the WTF Three in the Attic [1968 / trailer] & its sequel Up in the Cellar [1970 / trailer], Cotton Comes to Harlem [1970 / trailer], the overly familiar Cool Breeze [1972 / trailer], and more) plays Bella Garrington, the model girlfriend of one of Jason's grandsons. She and the Crockett family's Afro-American staff, Maybelle (blues singer Mae Mercer [12 Jun 1932 – 29 Oct 2008] of Pretty Baby [1978 / trailer], The Swinging Cheerleaders [1974 / trailer], and Dirty Harry [1971 / trailer]) and Charles (Lance Taylor Sr. [18 May 1915 – 6 Sept 1984] of Blacula [1972 / trailer]), leave midway for civilization, but while we never see exactly what happens to them, we later learn that they obviously didn't make it to safety.

Not from the film —

Mae Mercer with Sonny Boy Williamson live:

Ray Milland, on the other hand, hovers indeterminably amidst the thespian resolve of Pace and Elliot: if his turn as the almost militant, bullheaded and loveless patriarch is in any way convincing, it's because he obviously hates being in the movie and often seems drunk. Somehow, his seething inebriation lends credence to his refusal to let killer kritters and a few dead family members stand in the way of his annual July birthday celebration. His demise is long in waiting — for that matter, all deaths are long in waiting, as they are always preceded by an interminable and anything but suspenseful tease period — and is also, in all truth, the most anti-climactic.

 

 

"I'm as heartbroken as anybody over this tragedy, but I won't let anything interfere with today's schedule!"
Jason Crockett (Ray Milland)

 

Of the kills, the one that would have impressed the most is probably the one found in the first cut of the movie and (partially) found in the original trailer: the addle-brained butterfly collector Aunt Iris (Holly Irving [16 Jul 1917 – 28 Dec 2002] of The Crowded Sky [1960, with Anne Francis), was originally killed by a big butterfly pulling her into quicksand, but cooler heads seem to have prevailed because by the time the movie hit the cinemas, her death was reshot using less-WTF leeches and a rattler. Still, as with the fates of most of the family members, you can't help but laugh as she dies. (One wonders why the filmmakers saw it as acceptable to have sentient Spanish moss working together with tarantulas to kill family member Michael Martindale [David Gilliam of Severance (2006 / trailer) and Gunpowder (1986 / trailer)] but found the idea of a giant butterfly unacceptable.)

Regardless of the how anyone dies in the movie, however, rest assured that the deaths are neither frightening nor even competently filmed. The demise of Jenny Crockett (Lynn "Miss Arizona 1957" Bordon [24 Mar 1937 – 3 Mar 2015] of Hellhole (1985, with Edy Williams), and Black Mama White Mama [1973]) stands out in particular as a good laugh, but rest assured that there is not a single shown death that doesn't instigate either mirth or groans.

Okay, Frogs is truly terrible and boring movie that should perhaps better be titled An Exercise in Incompetence. There is nothing about the movie that should make it enjoyable, that should make you want to bother to watch it. But it is one of those rare movies that manages somehow, well, if not to transcend its countless faults, then to at least present them in such a road-kill manner that the movie, as boring as it is, becomes mesmerizingly watchable. And the more people watching it at the same time, the better. Just don't forget the beer and smoke.

German poster by Lutz Peltzer

BTW: At least one online source claims that for the NYC release of Frogs, the movie was paired with one of the most ridiculous Japanese Godzilla movies, the ecology-minded Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971), a.k.a. Godzilla vs. Hedorah, a movie famous for its scene in which the Smog Monster, having tossed Godzilla in a deep pit, proceeds to cover Godzilla with sludgy shit. A Godzilla movie worth watching.

Trailer to

Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster:

The Survivalist (USA, 2022)

(Spoilers.) Not to be confused with The Survivalist (2015 / trailer), a somewhat older and even more low-budget, post-apocalyptic movie that is both a bit more demanding and memorable. But if this Survivalist is unarguably the lesser of the two movies — say, spam vs. hotdog — it works well enough for what it is: a relatively generic but mildly diverting 1.5 hours of genre entertainment, interspersed with moments of unintentional laughter, a few truly effective scenes, some truly botched opportunities, a mildly interesting but ultimately distracting narrative structure telling past and present, uneven acting, and a storyline that just never seems to work as well as it should.

In regard to the story as a whole, the movie never works as well as it does the first five minutes, which quickly tells how society falls apart when a world-wide epidemic of a 99%-fatal strain of COVID breaks out. The scenes are accompanied by the chattering of an unknown woman on the radio (an uncredited Lori Petty, of Tank Girl [1995] and Route 666 [2002]), a survivor somewhere that seems to fill her time on air, babbling less like a post-apocalyptic radio announcer than a CB-radio enthusiast (remember CB radios?) on a roll.

Trailer to

The Survivalist:

The world of The Survivalist is the world of today, but slightly worse-off. COVID has now mutated into a virus that simply kills everyone — no "long COVID" here — and civilization as we know it has fallen apartment.* But low, one man survives the illness, Aaron Ramsey (John Malkovich of Shadow of the Vampire [2000 / trailer], Jonah Hex [2010 / trailer], Mutant Chronicles [2008], Warm Bodies [2013 / trailer], and Bullet Head [2017]), and before you can say Charles Manson, he has a fanatically faithful group of followers convinced he is the new messiah sent to save mankind.

* "This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper." — T.S. Eliot

But for that, he needs his fertile incubator. And so he and his faithful are hot on the trail of a young lady, Sarah (Ruby Modine, of better films, like Central Park [2017 / trailer], Happy Death Day I [2017 / trailer] & Happy Death Day 2U [2019 / trailer] and Satanic Panic [2019 / trailer]), whom they believe to be immune, with the intention of using her as the Eve of a new, COVID-resistant breed of mankind seeded by Ramsey. (Hey, not the stupidest thing to believe — some people actually believe Trump will save America.) She and her brother, Guy (Tom Pecinka of The Kill Room [2023/ trailer]), go on the run, doggedly pursued by the messiah and his motley crew. As a duo, they don't make it far, leading Guy to basically walk into the path of the bullets of the faithful so as to enable Sarah to make it to the compound of "the survivalist", Ben Hodges (Jonathan Rhys Meyers of the forgotten classic of cheese that is Killer Tongue [1996 / trailer], Octane [2003 / trailer] and Disquiet [2023 / trailer]) — who, despite having only been an office pencil-pusher at the FBI, seems to have a rep. Needless to say, Aaron and company soon show up and, well, you pretty much probably know the story already, don't you? 

Directed by B-film director John Keeyes (The Harrowing [2017 / trailer], Doom Room [2013 / trailer] and the short Mechanical Grave [2012 / trailer], amongst others), The Survivalist appears to be the first of four films written by scriptwriter Matthew Rogers,* who does not seem to be a man of any notable originality. The somewhat commonplace story Rogers wrote for The Survivalist is decidedly run-of-the-mill — we've seen it before, done better and done worse — but it also has, as already mentioned, some good unintentional guffaws and a decent scene of two. The biggest twist of the narrative, however, that the heroine, Sarah — SPOILER! — is basically a contemporary Typhoid Mary COVID Mary, is true headscratcher of a decision. In two seconds she goes from a young woman in desperate need of help to an incredibly selfish person: she consciously seeks out the help of the (healthy) survivalist Ben Hodges (Meyers), a man she doesn't even know, knowing in advance that her presence will infect him with a 99%-fatal virus. (Gee, she's really lucky that he's such a straight-up and understanding guy.) 

* All of which — namely, this flick here, Code Name Banshee (2022 / trailer), The Collective (2023 / trailer) and The Clean Up Crew (2024 / trailer) — were directed by John Keeyes. As a genre filmmaker, he is a very active and productive director.

Malkovich, who doesn't seem to say no to anything nowadays, has some howler dialogue when he first shows up, and one would be hard to say that he really nails it initially. But for all the questionable dialogue he has to spout, he keeps his gravitas and, by the end of the movie, achieves a level of believability and effectiveness. 

Meyers, in turn, usually remains believable as the kill-reluctant survivalist, but he truly makes some odd choices — like how he always chooses to duke it out with the individual fanatic instead of simply shooting them in the back. Seriously: they have said they are going to kill him, they have invaded his compound, they have shot him and they are actively trying to end his life, and yet he remains reluctant to the end to slay them, only doing so (with relative efficiency, after first always being beat to a pulp and despite bullet wounds) when it gets down to the brass tacks of being killed or killing. 

The killings, like the film itself, may be violent, but they are hardly glorified or heroic or flashy. That the deaths are always so dirty and undignified is perhaps one of the strongest aspects of the movie, as they buck the contemporary trend of aesthetic flash and high-fashion action choreography so common to most kill-happy flicks of the day. Somewhere along the way, it is faintly dropped that Aaron and Ben may have a history somewhere, but the point is never followed up on; but, for that, The Survivalist spends a lot of time filling in Ben's back story. Time and again, and particularly whenever the action starts, Ben has a flashback, which cumulatively reveal his troubled relationship to his gambling-addicted father Heath (Julian Sands [4 Jan 1958 – 13 Jan 2023] of Romasanta [2004], The Painted Bird [2019 / trailer], and Death Rider in the House of Vampires [2021 / trailer]) and how Ben came to his ranch and became "the survivalist". The flashbacks may be great for filling in Ben's backstory, but they do kill the tension, sorely and continually undermining the suspense of a movie that already has problems establishing and maintaining any. 

Neither truly bad nor all that good, The Survivalist ultimately falls smack-dab within the realm of the mildly entertaining but irrelevant. We blew 1.50€ at a cut-out store for our DVD of the middling movie, and while we don't exactly feel ripped off, we don't exactly feel like the movie was worth the money. On the other hand, if you can watch The Survivalist for free, you could do worse.