Kattiera Nana I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Jerrie It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Alien_I_Creator Get this... the movie is like a cross between The Evil Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the Jersey Devil myth thrown in for good measure. It stars horror veterans Felissa Rose, Edwin Neal, and Ellen Sandweiss. Sounds like the recipe for a really superb horror flick, right?...WRONG!!!!! Satan's Playground proves that a great premise and good cast will only take a movie so far and not save it, in any way, from being a stinker. Absolutely brimming with horror cliché's and cheap thrills, this movie took a lot of good potential and tossed it out the window.The film is about a couple who are headed out into the woods for a nice little camping trip with their mentally-challenged son and the wife's sister in tote. While on the road they, OF COURSE, have car trouble. After getting stuck in the mud, the man goes for help and finds an old, creepy house out in the woods. The house, OF COURSE, belongs to a family of bloodthirsty devil-worshiping killers.Do I really need to continue further? About the only good thing this movie had going for it was the atmosphere and cinematography. It was genuinely creepy and evil. The set-pieces were great, too. The director could have taken that and run with it a lot further. It was prevented by bad writing, bad acting, and all those annoying stereotypical situations. It reminded me of a cheap horror movie that would be made around the early-mid 90s before horror started to self-realize a lot.Overall, it's a very trite and lackluster effort.

FieCrier A family in New Jersey drives along an isolated road, and the father is falling asleep at the wheel. His wife (I thought at first she was his daughter) mainly bitches at him, and he falls asleep two or three times since nobody has the sense to replace him behind the wheel. Their station wagon gets stuck in mud alongside a road. They're unable to push it out and don't try to put anything under the wheels for traction. The father walks into the woods to find help for some reason, rather than walking down the road. He comes across a boarded- up house and asks for a phone.What seems like like hours later, the wife (Felissa Rose) goes off in the woods in the same direction. Somehow she winds up at the same house, and asks for the phone. While she had earlier said that her son was foaming at the mouth in the back seat of the car because he was scared and not because of a seizure, at the house she says her autistic eighteen- year-old son was having a seizure. She also says that her husband has seen a house in the woods - he hadn't. The old woman at the house mentions she has thirteen children, two of them living at home, both of them in their forties and retarded.A cop stops by the house. He says there had been some kids dressed up in Halloween costumes outside. He hears Felissa calling for help in the basement, but accepts the old woman's explanation that it's a stray cat. Dumb! He returns to his car, an old beater with a blue light on top. He gets attacked by something from the sky, and these minor injuries apparently kill him. Despite the death of a police officer, later in the movie they send out just one officer and one of the victims to check the house!Back at the car, the sister sees the cop's car parked in front of the station wagon. Why didn't he check the station wagon before going to the house? How did he see the people outside the house when it was far in the woods? How did he return to his car so quickly? This is a movie with lots of writing and continuity problems.Sis leaves her baby in the car when she checks the police car, and naturally it's gone when she returns. She goes into the woods, also manages to come across the same house, and asks to use the phone. She freaks out there, and scares a teenage girl who stopped by the house to use the phone. Surprising the old lady's palm reading business wasn't more popular at such a popular location!The autistic son had gone into the woods also and knocked himself out. He too goes to the house, and eventually gets sucked into the ground, like a character in Tomaselli's Desecration, which is more interesting than this movie!And on it goes. Much of the musical score is quite poor, particularly the instrumental song that is apparently supposed to be playing on the radio. The acting is just execrable, almost all-around. I couldn't say whether this was the casting or the direction of the actors. Ellen Sandweiss is OK, and attractive, but has a small role. There are horror clichés aplenty, like one character finding it easier to jump out what is apparently a third story window, than trying to break through a thin first-story door with a large window in it. The ending is pathetic, a steal from Evil Dead that I suppose is meant as a tribute, but just feels cheap.Avoid!

causeiwantto2001 I don't know if I should have added a warning about spoilers, but that's because I couldn't find a point to this movie at all! Seriously,I don't know what I'd be spoiling? The characters must have had some point, but I couldn't find it, and I will not subject myself to watching this train wreck ever again! Maybe you need to be part of a satanic order of sorts? The most shocking thing is this movie found distribution! If 0 was a score, I would have given this pearl a minus 10! Im sure anyone not associated with the film, that have seen it will agree! But if you don't please let me know what the hell this film was about! This film is one for the Twilight Zone!

stmichaeldet Wow.I have to say, I've seen a lot of bad films in my time, but not many that can rival Satan's Playground. And, it's not a good kind of bad, either. More like the "shake your head sadly and pity everyone involved" kind of bad.The plot is simply a basic, Texas Chainsaw ripoff. A group of people are stranded in the middle of nowhere and are killed one after another by a family of inbred mutant hicks. Of course, in TCM, the inbreds had to work a bit to take down their prey; in this movie, the victims are dim enough to walk straight up to the horror house one at a time, knock on the door, and ask to use the phone. One right after another, like clockwork. Oh, and there's a lurking monster - the Jersey Devil - thrown in to pick off the stragglers. Just don't expect JD to actually put in an on-camera appearance; that, apparently, was too much effort for this production.But don't worry about the plot so much; most likely, you'll be too distracted by the atrocious casting to worry about it. Our victims, far as I can tell, are a family unit - Mom, Dad, Sis, Sis' baby, and Autistic Bro. Took forever to figure that out, though, since Dad looks about 45-50, Mom looks like she's in her late twenties, Sis looks about 30, while A-Bro is established at 18, and looks about 23. The baby, however, is convincingly infantile. Much like the rest of this flick. (Yeah, I know it's a cheap shot, but can you blame me?) After you've wrapped your head around that, then you can marvel at how... busy the middle of nowhere is. As mentioned above, we've got four separate scenes of the principles wandering up to Casa Mutata, plus another, totally unrelated and irrelevant stranded woman pounding on the door (and basically being told to stand in line behind the rest of the movie if she wants killin'), random Satanists coming up on the weekend to perform unholy rites in the inbreds' front yard, a cop who seems to be patrolling in area (and doesn't bother to check out the stranded vehicle stuck not 20 yards from where he parked), and several cars driving up and down the backwoods dirt roads. One of which won't even slow down to help a fleeing victim.Nothing hangs together, or even appears to be trying to make any sense. Even if you're a fan of the badfilm, I'd recommend you take a pass on this one.