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Scarred (2005)

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Overall Rating 35%
Overall Rating
Ranked #11,012
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Twenty years ago, after his wife gave birth to another man's baby, an alcoholic husband sought revenge by slicing off the child's face and throwing her tiny body in the swamp. Today, the locals say that the little girl never really died -- and that she aimlessly roams the forest looking for a pretty face to take for her own. Now, a family of campers who've come to the woods for the weekend are in for a gruesome surprise. --TMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: December 28, 2005
Tonight's tale begins when well-meaning father Frank (George Williams) takes his daughter Kim (Julian Berlin) and son Ben (Jonny Mack) on a camping trip so that they can all bond with Frank's new wife Heather (Maxine Bahns). It turns out that Kim and Ben aren't too happy with this new lady being forced into their lives, especially since (as they say) she only married him for his money and is young enough to be his daughter. In order to persuade Kim to come along, Frank allowed her to bring her best friend Alex (Charity Shea) along for the ride, so we now have a nice five-some settling down in the middle of the woods for some family bonding and smores. That's so cute, isn't it?

The fun is interrupted, however, when park ranger Jesse (David Austin) shows up and tells them the tale of the deranged woman living in these woods. This lady (Hannah Leigh), you see, was born to a poor couple that used to live in these very woods... the only problem is that the child was conceived when her mother cheated on her father. Daddy isn't too happy with this grand revelation, so he picks up a hunting knife and cuts the child's face off before throwing her limp body into the nearby swamp and then murdering his wife and killing himself. But somehow, the child survived, and now stalks these woods looking for a pretty face to cut off and make her own. With three fresh-faced female teens wandering these woods, it doesn't take long before this sadistic lady "shows her face" and begins to pick the family apart one by one.

On the one hand, the general storyline has been done to death over the years. Sure, the face-stealing aspect was pretty fresh to the genre, but the basic gist of things (a group of teens in the woods being stalked by a murderer) has been done time and time again with varying levels of success. On the other hand, I found that this movie was a nice throwback to the slasher films of the eighties, complete with the same tired cliches and stupid mistakes by the heroines. Being a fan of these old-school slasher flicks, I did get a good deal of enjoyment out of this one; however, you should be aware that this is by no means original, and those of you who are looking for a modern-styled horror film will likely walk away disappointed.

The infamous Joe Bob Briggs rated these movies according to his three B's scale - Blood, Breasts, and Beasts. It's a good system for these films, so I'll put it to use for this review. On the blood side of things, we've got some nice treats in store - the villain of the film cuts peoples faces off to wear as her own, and the directors don't shy away from showing these face-rippings to the camera. The amount of blood shown was a bit lower than what one would expect from this type of film, but I was quite content with what was shown. The movie fails in the breasts side of things, as there is not a trace of nudity to be found. There's a few make-out scenes and a lone panty-shot, but that's as hardcore as it gets. However, the movie shines in the beasts category with the female Leatherface-clone. While the makeup job used for her scarred (lack of a) face is decent enough, it wasn't anywhere near perfect, and I wasn't too fond of her constant shrieking and screaming. When the guttural sounds of your female villain reminds me of a pro wrestler (Mankind), well, perhaps a detour in that train of thought would have worked wonders. However, with those two things aside, she worked out nicely in the eyes of yours truly. She was menacing, she was ruthless, and above all else, she had that "invincible" factor that is required of the villains from those eighties slashers that I hold so dear. It seemed that no matter what the heroes did to her, she'd manage to get up and cause just a little bit more carnage in the next scene, and that really kept the tension level going throughout the running-time of the film.

The acting abilities put forth by the cast is also reminiscent of those slasher films. While I have seen far, far worse, nobody really stood out in my eyes, and there's certainly no memorable parts to be had here. Almost everyone did their part in keeping things believable and there were no laughs to be had at incredibly botched lines (although there were a few unintentionally awkward scenes), but again, don't rent this one with the expectation of award-winning acting. The one exception to the above statement came in the form of a certain cast-member that shows up late in the film and was excluded from the above synopsis due to me not wanting to spoil things. To be fair, the lady had no former acting experience and she did appear to be trying quite hard to make the character work, but I found that she just wasn't cutting things and in fact, tended to drag the movie down a bit every time she was on screen. Thankfully, she doesn't have a huge part in things, but another actress could have made things so much better.

Fans of those eighties slashers should get a kick out of this one as much as I did. It's far from an award-winning movie and I doubt that it'll top anyone's favorites list, but if you're looking for some mindless slasher carnage, you could do much, much worse than this entry. 6/10.
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