2005, United States. Starring Felissa Rose, Ellen Sandweiss , Edwin Neal, Irma St. Paule, Danny Lopes, Christie Sanford, Ron Millkie, Salvatore Paul Piro, Robert Zappalorti, Jessy Hodges, Chris Farabaugh, Michael Ryan. Written and directed by Dante Tomaselli. Buy it now from Amazon.com.

Why oh why do people walk into dusty, cobweb-covered, boarded up ruins and yell, "Hello? Is anyone here? Hello?" Lord, don't these people have any basis whatsoever in the real world? Who sees a crumbling shack out in the middle of nowhere and spends a few minutes walking around the obviously derelict calling out to see if anyone is there? Well, apparently people in poorly thought-out horror films do. I made fun of it when it happened in Zombie 3, but then, making fun of something that happens in Zombie 3 is sort of a foregone conclusion. I was hoping I wouldn't see something that glaringly stupid again, but I guess I was wishing against the inevitable. If you write a crummy horror film, then there's a good chance someone is going to walk into an abandoned, rotting building full of trash and dust, and yell out, "Is anyone here?" If you can combine that with someone going, "Bob, is that you? Come on! This isn't funny anymore!" then you have just written 95% of all the exchanges in crummy horror films.

Dante Tomaselli's Satan's Playground isn't exactly a crummy horror film, but it does enough stupid things to keep it from being a good movie. It's a movie full of potential that isn't realized thanks to the standard microbudget horror film bugbear: the script. I know, I know. I should put my money where my mouth is and show these whupper-snappers how to write a decent script. It's not for lack of ideas or talent (well, at least not for lack of ideas). I haven't done it yet for one very important reason: I am, when it comes to getting work done, phenomenally lazy. I'm so lazy that I'm almost too lazy to tell you how lazy I am. Still, you don't have to be President of the United States to recognize a rotten president, and you don't have to write a script to recognize a rotten script.

Satan's Playground is one of what I personally think are far too few movies that deal with the legend of the Jersey Devil, though it deals with the mythical beastie in a very roundabout way, focusing instead on the Leeds clan, a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style family of nutjobs, the matron of which supposedly gave birth to the Jersey Devil, which in turn gave birth to a whole hockey team. For those of you not familiar with the legend of the Jersey Devil, you should peruse the various issues of the excellent fanzine Weird NJ, as they have adopted the legend and cartoon of the creature as their mascot. But should you not be prone to tracking down issues of the magazine or of their accompanying book, here's the legend in a nutshell:

Sometime in early 1700s (the date, like most other aspects of the story, varies wildly depending on who is telling it and which version they are telling), a woman named Leeds, living in the ominous stretch of south Jersey swampland known as the Pine Barrens, gave birth to the latest of some thirteen or so children. Tired of being a fertile crescent of children, Mrs. Leeds exclaimed her displeasure at having another kid and bade the devil take this one off her hands. And so he did. Reports of the child's appearance differ, with some describing him as nothing more than human while others layer on the hideous disfigurements. Mrs. Leeds is also sometimes referred to as a witch, a Satanist, a British sympathizer, and someone who got on the bad side of a gypsy, all of which may have contributed in some way to the fate of her son (though I never knew that having familiar relations with a British officer could produce hellspawn beasts). The settled upon appearance of the Jersey devils these days is sort of an amalgamation of goat-man (the Goat Man was a popular woods-dwelling killer where I grew up, incidentally), bat, and human.

Since his inception as a local legend, the Jersey Devil has been blamed for all sorts of mischief along the lines of cattle slaughtering, destruction of public properties, and the occasional devouring of a wayward human. So basically, anything that could also be attributed to wild animals, damn teenagers^™, or a chupacabra. For a long time, however, the Jersey Devil was actually considered a protector of the Pine Barrens, and seeing him was supposed to be good luck. At some point, people decided a hellish, murdering beast made a much more enjoyable local legend than did an ugly steward of the forest teaching people about native berries and instructing youths on the proper way to safely extinguish a campfire.

In the reality of Satan's Playground, "good luck" manifests itself primarily by having your throat ripped out.

The movie begins with a family -- husband Frank (Salvatore Paul Piro -- who looks exactly like a guy who would be named Salvatore Pauli Piro) and wife Donna (Felissa Rose) who could not be more Jersey even if you injected them with pure essence of Jersey (which is stinky fumes and trash that was dumped there by New Yorkers who didn't have room for it in their own state), their mentally handicapped son Sean (Danny Lopez) who has a tendency to drool and foam at the mouth for no particular reason, a baby, and the baby's mother, Paula, who happens to be played by...Ellen Sandweiss! Why would anyone go into the woods with Ellen Sandweiss? The last time she went camping in the woods, it ended with her getting split up the middle by a demonic tree while the rest of the campers beat up Bruce Campbell. Going into the woods with Ellen Sandweiss is like going to a tropical island with Ian McCulloch: there are some things you just have to know better than to do.

Ellen Sandweiss hasn't made a movie that I know of since 1981, when she was attacked by the aforementioned tree in a movie no one remembers, directed by a guy I'm sure has absolutely no career these days. Where Dante Tomaselli found her, I don't know, though my first guess would be, "probably at one of the tables at the Chiller Theater convention." It's good to see her back in action, though the script gives her very little to do. In fact, the script gives pretty much everyone very little to do other than walk through the woods, run through the woods, then get hit in the head with a hammer. I hope you like seeing people run through the woods and get hit in the head with a hammer, because it's going to happen a lot in this movie.

Exactly what this family is doing out in the middle of nowhere (and if you've never seen Jersey beyond the area surrounding New York City, then let me assure you that yes, you really can get way the hell out in the middle of nowhere) is anyone's guess. I would assume a camping trip, albeit one with suitcases, but they mostly just seem to be driving aimlessly down whatever potholed, unpaved country road they can find. As happens when a family aimlessly drives their station wagon around in the swamp, they get stuck. And they start hearing weird noises. And the son keeps pointing at something up in the trees. Having nothing better to do, the members of the cast file off one by one into the woods, with each one stumbling upon the old Leeds house (which is pretty impressive, considering that there is no path through the woods, and everyone leaves at different times, including in the middle of the night). Mrs. Leeds (Irma St. Paule) is still in residence (don't know if she's been lurking about since the 1700s, though), along with her giggling psychotic daughter and son (who are looking really good if they'v ebeen around since the 1700s). And there are also devil worshippers around, whipping naked dudes, for no real reason and with no real connection to the plot. But hey, what film was ever harmed by a gratuitous scene of cloaked devil worshippers whipping some nameless naked dude? Remember when they had that same scene in Pay it Forward? That was the best part of that movie. Or am I mixing it up with that episode of Starsky and Hutch where they fight devil worshippers while wearing red union suit long johns (just like the actual Devil wears)? No, I'm pretty sure it was Pay it Forward.

What follows is the standard "normal folks stalked by a family of psychos" plot that has been worn thin since the days of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes.

As with most of the microbudget horror films I've seen, the biggest problem with Satan's Playground is that there's just not enough script to go around, and what is there is frightfully unoriginal and plagued by colossal gaps in logic (or competence). At times, the Leeds house seems to be out in the middle of the woods with no sane living being around for miles, yet a passing police car notices devil worshippers frolicking on the front lawn and stops to investigate. When we see the police car, it is parked near the family's stranded station wagon, yet when people leave the station wagon it seems to take them a long time to wander to the Leeds house. Similarly, there's a completely pointless scene in which a hysterical Paula (Ellen Sandweiss) runs out the front door and smack dab into another person whose car broke down and is looking for assistance. Where the hell did this person come from? Does the Jersey Devil spend his days digging potholes in the gravel road in hopes of snaring unwary drivers? The dialogue exchanged between the young girl and ranting, blood-drenched Paula is also priceless. "My car broke down, but I can see you have your own things to deal with, so I'm leaving."

So is the Leeds house out in the middle of the swamp, or is it sitting fifty feet off of highway 9? For an isolated farmhouse, there sure seem to be a lot of people wandering by at random.

One would also assume the Satanists, wearing the requisite red cloaks they've had ever since they bugged Warren Oates and Hot Lips in their RV, are related in some way to the Leeds clan, perhaps even members of the family. But when one of them menaces Donna, he finds himself attacked by Mrs. Leeds' son, Boy (Edwin Neal -- not sure if this is supposed to be Tarzan's Boy all grown up and in a green surplus Army jacket, but I'm going to assume it is). Nothing else about the devil worshippers ever comes up again, except when Mrs. Leeds complains that they're a nuisance. I assumed she was laying it on for the cop, disavowing any knowledge of the Satanists and trying to paint herself as a helpless victim of "damn teenagers" -- which is an awful complex fib to weave considering that she's just going to have her daughter hit the cop with a hammer a couple seconds later. But then, maybe she was telling the truth, and what we learn is that even if you are the mother of a nightmarish brood of psychotic freaks that includes the Jersey Devil himself, you can still get irritated by kids playing around on your front lawn.

I could forgive all that pretty easily if the film paid off in other ways. Instead, the script just keeps collapsing on itself and piling on the, "Oh, come on!" moments. After Donna narrowly escapes her harrowing ordeal (by making it to a road and hitching a ride with a guy who seems remarkably unphased for someone who just picked up a screaming woman covered in blood) and we get the usual "wakes up in the hospital" scene, the local sheriff decides to go out and investigate her claims -- with no one but Donna as company. They establish that they know at least four people are missing and probably dead, including another cop, and he goes out into the woods with no radio and absolutely no back-up other than the freaked-out victim who just escaped the scene? And when he discovers that there is indeed something foul and murderous going on, he still doesn't call for backup and instead decides to explore the house he knows is populated by murderers and blood smears with no one by his side other than Donna? Don't the people who write these scripts make any effort whatsoever to reflect even the most basic of actual police procedure? I don't mind getting the details wrong, but this is absurd. This is an example of a writer making characters do something phenomenally nonsensical because it's the only way the writer could think of to get where he wanted to be. It really irritates me when people do things no actual person would ever do, simply because the script demands it of them.

For that matter, you'd think the Leeds clan would stick to murdering wayward hikers and stoners and shy away from murdering cops. From what I hear, cop killers tend to attract special attention from other cops, who generally aren't amenable to just rolling casually with it when one of their own goes missing or turns up dead. And it's not like the Leeds's were being clever about it. The cop car was still sitting on the road, and there are not many other places the cop could be, especially if he radioed in beforehand (though given what we see from the cops in this movie, that is unlikely).

But what irritates me even more than that is when a movie resets itself and you have to watch the whole movie play out again in an abbreviated format. This happens all the time, though most recently I was up late and watching a phenomenally dull and monotonous horror film called Cabin by the Lake on the Sci-Fi Channel. It starred Judd Nelson as the world's least interesting serial killer, and it did almost exactly what Satan's Playground does. The lone survivor gets away from the killer(s), is subject to something completely unrealistic and stupid done by the police, which results in her being right back where she was before her previous escape, so we have to watch the whole goddamn thing again. To the credit of Satan's Playground, it handles its plot redux much faster than Cabin by the Lake (which just might be one of my most hated movies of all time), but I'm still annoyed whenever a film can't think of anything else to do than repeat itself. And Satan's Playground is nothing but repeating itself. A guy goes into the woods and gets captured. A woman follows him and gets captured. Then someone else follows and gets captured. Then one more person follows, and they get caught, too. Then one of them escapes and comes back and repeats the whole thing. It's like watching the exact same ten-minute movie stitched together five or six times.

Now, at this point, you may be asking about the Jersey Devil. Other than providing an excuse for the mentally handicapped kid to point at the sky a few times, he has no real role in this movie until he makes a cameo in a completely nonsensical aside where a stoner departs from a group of hikers so he can, as the kids say, "toke his reefer, dude!" This is also the film's one gore effect. Now, I don't demand gore from my horror films, but usually microbudget filmmakers slack in other areas because they're excited about all their gore effects. Tomaselli slacks with the script, but the movie doesn't try to compensate with gore. The Jersey Devil is also never shown -- which is actually a good idea, I think. Nothing undermines a monster's crdibility more than revealing it to be a really laughable special effect. At least the Jersey Devil maintains some air of mystery and menace that way. Still, his interaction with the main cast is almost non-existent, so even though I described this movie as being about the Jersey Devil, it's only that way tangentially. Mrs. Leeds and two of her other children are the actual villains.

I know, I know. I always pick on the scriptwriter, but I only do that because the scripts are always so bad, and they frequently undercut what could have otherwise been a good movie. Satan's Playground possesses a decent concept, and Dante Tomaselli is talented as a director. The cast is actually somewhat professional, elevating the acting stories above the monotone of inexperienced "friends and family members" that usually comprise the cast of such films. And although Tomaselli's movie is slow, it wouldn't be boring if it didn't repeat the same thing over and over. He creates a suitably bleak and isolated atmosphere, and the Pine Barrens are a perfectly chilling looking backdrop for the action.

But all these positive aspects are hamstrung by such a meandering, repetitive, and derivative script, that they get lost under the sheer weight of how clumsy the writing is. Almost all microbudget horror films, it seems, are the labors of love of their directors, and many of these directors are good directors. But they're not good scriptwriters, and they're not good at picking good scriptwriters. It seems to me that in their enthusiasm for making a horror movie, they get impatient with the labor-intensive, generally unsatisfying process of creating a good script. And I say "unsatisfying" meaning that, while just about every aspect of making a film -- especially one with a tiny budget -- is labor intensive, the labor that goes into crafting the script generally lacks the concrete sense of daily accomplishment that comes from something more active, like being on location or reviewing a day's footage. These things are labor-intensive, all right, but there is more of an immediate pay-off than there is with writing a script, whose value is never fully realized until the entire product is finished and the creation of which usually just requires someone to sit alone in a room with a bottle of scotch and a laptop.

So it doesn't surprise me that the script almost always gets the short end of the stick, though it does sadden me as a writer; and you would think that after years of similar bad scripts, someone would realize that the thing can actually be important to a movie and finally stop glossing over it in favor of just getting out there and shooting footage.

Anyway, I think I've made the point, and the fact is that everything that makes Satan's Playground bad is the fault of the script. Tomaselli is a gifted director. He knows how to use the camera, how to light a scene and properly record sound, how to move his actors around; in short, he knows how to direct, and he knows how to do it in a way that is more engaging than the too-common "set the camera up and film each scene like a stage play" type of static shot on which many amateur films rely, and the "every second must be a wild jump cut full of shaky cam and random images and screaming" overkill that ruins almost every larger-budget horror film being made these days. No, Tomaselli knows how to direct; he just doesn't know how to come up with material worth his directing skills (a trait he shares with David Buchert, who directed the last microbudget horror film I reviewed, Blood Oath). Dante Tomaselli the screenwriter just doesn't deserve to be working with Dante Tomaselli the director.

Although I mentioned it in passing, I want to dwell a little more on the quality of the cast. Most microbudget horror films rely on non-actors to do the acting, with a few genre staples appearing in enough films that they eventually stumble into some degree of competence and recognition for their contribution to the cause of starring in bad shot-on-video horror films. Tiffany Shepis might be the current reigning queen of such performers -- a decent actress in bad films. Misty Mundae was there for a little while until she made the switch to softcore comedies and finally, it seems, to legitimate film (where she goes by her real name and is proving that she is genuinely talented and worthy of being recognized for more than just her willingness to get naked and give Billy Hellfire a blowjob). But these types of stars are few and far between, and the vast majority of horror films in the DTV market feature people with a complete lack of acting experience -- and it almost always shows.

Tomaselli, on the other hand, put some effort into casting people beyond the proverbial group of friends that usually make up the DTV horror film talent pool. For starters, he flushed Ellen Sandweiss out of hiding and got her acting again. Felissa Rose appeared in the original Sleepaway Camp before going on to a prolific career starring in low budget horror films that no one but the type of people who read this site would have ever heard of. Edwin Neal, who plays Mrs. Leeds' murderous non-Jersey Devil son, is most recognizable to horror fans as the loony hitchhiking member of the family from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You know, the guy who gives the informative educational speech about headcheese. He's also an extremely busy voice actor, having begun his career back in 1972 or so, dubbing the Japanese cartoon Gatchaman, better known in the United States as Battle of the Planets. He's been dubbing anime and sentai shows ever since, with occasional time off to appear in films like Zombiegeddon, which also happens to feature Felissa Rose and two of my all-time favorite B-movie mainstays: Joe Estevez and Robert "The Chin" Z'dar.

Of the main cast, Christie Sanford (who plays the hammer-happy Leeds daughter) and Danny Lopez (who plays the mentally handicapped son of Donna) perhaps have the least experience, but even they still have experience. In other words -- this is a cast of actors. Some young, some seasoned, but almost all (at least in the core cast) experienced with and professional about the job. They are all pretty good at what they do. But they are ill-served by a script that doesn't give them much at which they can be good. There's only so many ways an actor can wander through the woods or into an abandoned gas station and call out, "Is anybody here?" There's only so many ways they can scream, "You're crazy!" Dante Tomaselli put a lot of work into the film. He put effort into assembling a real cast, which must have pushed the budget way above the usual breaking point for microbudget filmmakers who only hire actors that will work for beer and weed. I think this is the most disappointing thing about Satan's Playground -- Tomaselli assembles an impressive array of pieces and puts a lot of work into crafting them, but then completely ignores the fact that his foundation is so shaky.

Satan's Playground has enough wrong with it to keep it from being very good. But it also does some things right that make it worth seeing if you are a student of the low-budget horror game, and especially if you are a potential filmmaker. There are lessons to be learned from Tomaselli's direction, casting, editing, and the overall atmosphere he creates, just as there is an equally important lesson to be learned from the weakness of the script. And while Satan's Playground is ultimately a deeply flawed effort, it's enough for me to think that there might be reason to keep an eye on Tomaselli as he progresses -- provided he progresses. Microbudget filmmakers tend to show a notorious immunity to getting any better at their craft. Tomaselli feels like he might be different, especially if he restricts himself to direction and not screenwriting. At the very least, I'm optimistic about his potential.

Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Microbudget, Horror: Satan, Year: 2005