Restricted Area (2019)

Director: Christopher M. Don
Writer: Christopher M. Don

 

I picked up the DVD of RESTRICTED AREA as YouTuber / actor Shawn C. Phillips' name is featured prominently on the DVD art. His YouTube channel, 'Coolduder', is one I watch from time to time and I was curious about his acting chops. Going in I knew the film was going to be bad; I had no idea it was going to be painful to watch or that Phillips' is only in the film for a few minutes. Sadly, those few minutes felt like an hour.

Pretend for a moment that you were just fired from your job at the steel mill along with everyone else as the mill is closing. Money is going to be an issue and good jobs will be hard to come by considering the town you live in will wither and die without the mill. What do you and three of your friends decide to do?

Go camping of course!

The four beer guzzlin', misogynistic, sad sacks may have thought their luck couldn't get worse but they happen to backpack through the 'restricted area'. An area where a cult with a business casual dress code has set up to recruit new members, kill those who trespass into their corner of the national forest they currently call home base, and perform their oddly affirmative cult rituals. It's blue collar worker v. cult minion in a battle royale in the forest.

Christopher M. Don is responsible for this amateur, dull, pointless, bloody awful mess of a film. The man wrote, directed, edited and photographed one of the worst made films I've seen. That the run time nearly hits the two hour mark says much about Don's depth of depravity. The man can barely point the camera in the right direction never mind figure out how the editing software works and yet has the audacity to think a two hour long film about idiots walking around the woods is entertaining cinema. This is the kind of film that gets made when the cast and crew lose the script and cope by consuming massive amounts of alcohol and go for it anyway.

I'm at a loss to explain how this was released on DVD. Someone had to watch the damn thing before slapping it on a disc.

1/2 * out of ****