New Release Review : Madison County

OUT TODAY ON DVD!

A group of college kids travel to a small, mountain town called Madison County to interview the author of a tell-all book on the accounts of several grisly murders that happened there. But when the kids get to Madison County, the author is nowhere to be found and the townspeople act like they haven't seen him in years, stating that the killer never existed and the murders never happened. However, when the kids start digging around to get their own answers, they find out that the stories may be more real than the townspeople are letting on. 

 Five youths venture into a creepy hillbilly town and get picked off one by one by a killer wearing a pig mask ... is Madison County as generic as it appears?  I hate when people use this expression but I kinda have to right now; do bears shit in the woods?

As I predicted several months back, based only on the trailer and plot description, yes, Madison County is as by the numbers and generic as horror films get.  From the 'five teens in the woods' setup to the early in the film stop at a tiny gas station run by a creepy all too pleasant seeming old woman right down to the abandoned car field and the characters that act less like humans in a survival situation and more like pieces of meat who want to be chopped up, there is not a single original thought or idea in the entire 82 minute run-time of this film.   Every horror film need not reinvent the wheel or be totally original, but this one is nothing but an incredibly irritating to watch exercise in formulaic horror that pretty much revels in all the things us horror diehards hate about the genre.

Oh and there are no cool kills, gory sequences or anything else fun thrown into that generic mix either. In other words, even if you've never seen a horror movie before, and the whole paint by numbers thing is lost on you, Madison County still brings absolutely nothing to the table.  Eek.

It's a shame, for this movie's sake, that it came along so soon after Cabin In The Woods, because after that film hit us over the noggin with such a harsh criticism of films exactly like this one, Madison County comes out smelling even worse than it would've otherwise.  This is 100% to a tee the kind of horror movie Cabin was pointing its finger at; an inside the box approach to the genre that takes a generic formula and cookie cutter characters (who are of course played by actors hired only for their slasher victim good looks), plugs a chosen killer into it, and then lets the two duke it out in a battle of bloody wits, wits which of course none of the characters possess.  'Hey, this dude just killed all my friends and tried to kill me.  I finally got him onto the ground, unconscious.  I'm holding a big axe.  I'm gonna run away now, because the writer was too lazy to come up with a different way for me to not succeed in my mission of getting the fuck out of this situation!!'

It's funny because I actually find myself watching these types of movies through different eyes after seeing Cabin In The Woods.  It's not that I didn't already feel the way I do about generic teens in the woods horror before Cabin came around, quite the contrary, but nowadays I can't help but laugh when I see characters in movies such as this decide to split up or drop a weapon when they've finally gotten the upper-hand over the killer.  I'm sure I'm not alone here in getting a kick out of the fact that I'm imagining 'stupid gas' being piped up their noses and electric charges being emitted from weapon handles when I see that kinda hogwash nowadays!

Us horror fans have been getting fooled by cool cover arts slapped atop shitty movies since the days of the VHS tape.  Please, do yourself a favor, save yourself the 80 minutes, and don't be fooled by that pig-headed axe wielding hillbilly up top there.  You've seen Hillbillies In The Woods before, and you do not need to see it again. Trust me.



Follow this kid's advice and stay out of Madison County ... for there is a killer on the loose there ... and it's name ... is BOREDOM!