A Hard Place features a cast of genre titans, including Felissa Rose (Sleepaway Camp, Terrifier 2), Lynn Lowry (Shivers, The Crazies), Sadie Katz (Wrong Turn 6, The Beast Inside), Rachel Amanda Bryant (Craving), Kevin Caliber (“Future Man”), Ashley Undercuffler (Craving, 16 Bits), and Bai Ling (The Crow).

I feel like, historically, we have gotten a lot of Vampires fighting Werewolves in pop culture. I’m not sure where this idea came from, but as a society, we seem to have determined that these two creatures of the night are bitter rivals.

What I want to see more of, however, is X Monster vs Y Monster. Why does it always have to be vampires and werewolves? I remember several years back seeing a flick called Dawn Of The Beast that ended in a Sasquatch fighting off a horde of Wendigo! That’s what we need more of in our horror fiction! Give me some real beastly things going to crash town at one another!

Today’s offering is called A Hard Place, and it hears our pleas. In a world of vampires vs werewolves, A Hard Place has the guts to ask “What about plant monsters vs ambiguously monstrous cannibal hillbillies?”.

What about that, indeed?

In the wake of the robbery of a drive-in movie theater, a team of thieves stops at an old barn in the woods to meet up with a forgery expert. Unfortunately, their trip is derailed when they are attacked by strange vegetation villains. They seem to get rescued by a group of locals, but it’s not long before they find out they’ve simply leaped out of the frying pan and into the fire…

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Felissa Rose is eating in this one, and by that I mean she is chewing all of the scenery. She is clearly having a blast in her role and is really reaching for the brass ring. She just gets to yell and shout and order people about, it’s a pretty meaty role for her, and she does her absolute best with it.

The problem here, such as having a strong performance can be a problem, is that it highlights how weak the other actors all seem to be… or, at least, how little fun they seem to be having with the script. Rose is just head and shoulders above everyone else in A Hard Place. It really makes you wish everyone else would rise to her level.

+ The plot is pretty fun, with the bones of it being a redneck family with hidden secrets defending themselves from plantlike monsters that live in the woods. It works as a fun horror story. There’s a lot you can do with that, as I mentioned above. Seeing monsters go to town on each other should be all you need!

Unfortunately, we don’t get enough of this, probably due to budget constraints. Out of a movie that is just shy of 90 minutes, we get less than ten of those minutes dedicated to showing the beasties going at it. But still, I’m sure they did the best they could, and I do appreciate that the flick knew enough to be fun and find some joy in the horror genre.

– The dialogue is legitimately among the worst I have ever heard in a movie. Characters are either spouting really cliche phrases or they just don’t sound natural or realistic at all. You have to wonder if the screenwriters didn’t say these things aloud after they wrote them and realize how bad it all sounds.

To be fair to the writers, though, the acting helps nothing, as I alluded to above. It’s possible that better delivery could have cleaned up some of these lines, but that’s not what we get here.

So what is the Down here? Unfortunately, it’s a combination of bad dialogue with possibly even worse acting. Honestly? This movie has a lot of problems, so I’m okay with combining two at this point. But the long and short of it is that virtually any time a character opens his or her mouth, you can bet something painful is about to come out.

– There are what feels like 58 characters, and you don’t get to know but four or five of them as the movie goes on. And you BARELY get to know those few. Aside from that small grouping, everyone is look-alike and sound-alike nobodies that exist just to fill out the roster and serve as cannon fodder. Which is fine to a degree because horror movies got to kill people off. But the deaths don’t mean anything here because you have no idea who anyone is vis a vis anyone else.

You start off with a gang of thieves (actually, you START OFF with the cast of a movie within the movie that A Hard Place keeps cutting back to for some reason), and then you add in a MASSIVE family of rednecks. And when people sub-divide off into smaller groups, it’s still hard to keep anything straight because everyone acts just like everyone else.

OVERALL

I really, Really, REALLY want to give A Hard Place credit for being fun. I really do. Because I watch so many dour and forgettable horror outings that seem to refuse to want to focus on the joy the genre can bring. And, if nothing else, I probably won’t FORGET A Hard Place for a while. But the movie is just riddled with problems, and the overall quality is that of a student film. The camera work and editing are poor, the writing is weak, the acting is stiff (outside of Ms. Rose). This just wasn’t a particularly pleasant watch.