Madison County - Squeal piggy, squeal! (in boredom)

When will American college students ever learn? All they seem to do is constantly drive off to remote towns in the mid-west in groups of four or five and get killed.

The five of this batch of kids has obviously never seen a slasher film (as perhaps has the writer, otherwise he might realise how `borrowed' every element of this movie actually is) as they stop at an out-of-the-way diner where every snaggle-toothed yokel stares at them menacingly. They pay for food, but never eat (I didn't get that bit!) then leave, only to be threatened by another knife-wielding nut-job.

So, what do they do? All decide to split up. No sooner does this happen than a psycho in a pig mask hunts them down one by one as they run, screaming through the woods in random directions. Sometimes one of the teenagers manages to fight back and knock out the killer, but they never bother finishing him off - only knocking him to the floor so he gets straight back up to chase them down again. Oh, and they never bother finding or keeping a weapon.

What you have here is nothing you haven't seen a hundred times before in the slasher genre. The only way this film would be any good is if you invented a time machine, sent it back to the early seventies and showed it to people then. Therefore, Madison County would be the `film that started it all' and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would just be a poor imitation. Sadly, in the real world, it's the other way around.

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back