A widowed firefighter seeks closure after his wife goes missing on an actual haunted road in rural New Jersey but must unlock the roads secret if he wants to get out alive.

Based on the many true sightings, encounters, and events of the infamous area, and marketed as starring Ice T but only featuring the veteran entertainer for all of about 10 minutes, Clinton Road (2019), directed by Richard Grieco and Steven Stanulis (story also by), is a ‘lost in the woods’ horror thriller with an attractive cast used in unattractive ways.

In Clinton Road, a man named Michael (Ace Young) has his bride to be go missing off of a haunted highway, a forested area in the bowels of New Jersey known for sinister cult gatherings, ghosts, and other strange things that go bump in the night. Years later, he and his sister in law, Isabella (Katie Morrison), are still plagued by her memory, so to help themselves find closure, he and his group of friends decide to go hiking through the shadowy woods off of Clinton Road in order to perform a spiritual cleansing and find peace in the place that took their beloved. During their hike, one friend named Begory (James DeBello), who is the group’s spiritual guide, suffers a seizure, prompting the friends to split up to find help. Little do they know, the forest has already trapped them within its Bermuda triangle-like void, which keeps them within its perimeters on a loop, never allowing them to find their way back to civilization. In order to get out alive, the group of friends must solve the secrets of the woods, sticking together through one terrifying night stalked by a mallet-wielding man, creatures hidden within its murky lakes, and the ghosts of victims passed.

I know I shouldn’t be laughing when there is a scream queen running for her life through the woods, but goddammit I couldn’t help but start laughing at this movie within the first 30 seconds. I was quickly reminded of Freddy vs. Jason (2003), the kind of movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously but is otherwise shot like a well-done horror flick. It is a good thing this movie times out at just over an hour, and its cast of attractive actors are also a saving grace. It was not that the performances were necessarily bad — except for maybe the ever-cool Ice T, who plays RJ, a tough New Jersey club owner who just might be too cool to play scared effectively. No, I’d more so blame the cringy-ness on the story itself and the dialogue, with conversations that seemed to go nowhere, didn’t drive the story forward, nor add any insights into its characters. Another point of contention for me was most definitely the music score, with a loud rock track often screaming into scenes, and annoyingly, over the characters’ dialogue too.

The film has an ensemble cast rife for the picking, but the standout in this cringe-fest was Katie Morrison, who as the likable Isabella was the only one who played scared authentically, and the only female character not written as a vapid, boyfriend-obsessed hanger-on. The film also stars Ace Young as Michael the widower, who did finally breakthrough in one poignant scene towards the end, as well as James DeBello, Carlos Leon, Vincent Pastore, Lauren LaVera, Cody Calafiore, and Erin O’Brien.

The lesson of the story is: if the always cool calm and collected Ice T tells you that a forest is freaky, that forest is most definitely freaky and you should probably stay your attractive butt in the club that you crawled out of. Catch these sexy adults traipse through the woods in Richard Grieco and Steven Stanulis’s occult thriller Clinton Road is due for theatrical release June 14th, 2019,