A family in desperate need of bonding heads to the British countryside for a camping trip. After their site is vandalized, they seek shelter in an eerie old farm where a hostile farmer and his grossly disfigured son have a sinister plan.

Reviewing a film like Escape from Cannibal Farm presents something of a challenge. My aim when writing these reviews is, typically, to say as much about the nature of film and the broads strokes of where it succeeds and fails without delving too deeply into the details as to allow you, the reader, to discover these things on your own. Escape from Cannibal Farm resists this approach. My only means to convey to you stupidity to which I have borne witness without detailing the specifics of the truly baffling choices made would reduce me to a series of grunts and arm movements I fear would translate poorly into words. With this in mind, I will do my best to treat the characters in this film as if they had entered the witness protection and just describe the events with as few specifics as possible, to give the masochists out there a chance to endure this in its purest form, as I have.

The film starts with a couple of particularly cruel bullies approaching a boy and then tying him up in a sack before sitting with it along the edge of a creek, occasionally punching and berating the boy while smoking cigarettes. This moment of playful kidnapping is interrupted by tragedy as the sack instantly ignites upon coming into contact with a carelessly placed cigarette, causing the boys to throw it down into the creek and run away, a scene which is seen by the bullied boy’s mother, who doesn’t react to any of this until she sees the sack get thrown into the creek, which causes her and her husband to run in slow motion to some wistful, romantic piano music out to rescue the boy who remains trapped in his burning, open, burlap sack. Did I forget to mention that? The sack is open. The bullies are shown moments before opening it to look inside. You ever heard the phrase “can’t find his way out of a paper bag?” Well, it’s like that, but with a sack. So he gets burned and is known for the rest of time as “The Boy With The Melted Face” or at least that’s the name we’re given. There is just so much wrong here and we are less than 3 minutes in. I can understand to some degree the bullies throwing him in the creek out of panic, but why was the mother just standing idly by watching this before quickly reacting when she saw the sack get thrown in the creek? Did she have some idea that there was somebody inside the sack and was content to just watch these kids beat on them so long as they didn’t set them on fire? Why did the boy just let himself burn inside of an open sack? And those are just the first hints of the film’s tenuous grasp on logic, to say nothing of the hackneyed artistic direction with the sappy piano music and slow-motion running, a trick they pull in the very next scene when the mother kills herself via self-immolation, a result of what we’re told is guilt for something she was in no way at fault for, thus leaving her disfigured but otherwise perfectly healthy child motherless. Now you may say I’m coming down too hard on this film, nitpicking and looking for flaws and inconsistencies, but I would like to remind you we are 4 minutes into a 100-minute film and there is much more where that came from. To avoid turning this review into a damn novel of my cinematic regrets, let’s just cut to present day.

The majority of the film centers on a family taking a road trip out to the countryside to reconnect and enjoy nature without the burden of phones and social media. Their characters range from pointless to obnoxious and you’ll start to wish them a hasty death after the first few words come out of their mouths. There’s Catherine (Rowena Bentley), the matriarch of the family who just wants to spend time with her family and get them to warm up to her new husband, Wesley (Toby Wynn-Davies), the manliest man in mantown who reminds us of how much of a man he is in every scene and thinks vegans are something from Star Trek. Then there’s her daughter Jessica (Kate Davies-Speak) and her boyfriend Curtis (Joe Street), who are coming along primarily because they want to ask Catherine and Wesley for money. Last, and certainly least, there’s Toby (David Lenik), Catherine’s college student son who has been asked to take a leave from his studies to join the family so he can provide ceaseless insipid snark and his brother Sam (Dylan Curtis), who essentially serves the same role as Samantha from Donnie Darko or that one kid from Jerry Maguire, to throw out precocious one-liners. They set out to go to Hanson Farm, which I can’t imagine is listed as any sort of lodging or recommended by any websites (because it’s run by people who sell human meat, sorry for the spoiler, the movie has cannibal farm in the title) but they’re going there so stop asking questions. They end up getting lost, however, and while Wesley is a man and thus doesn’t want to ask anyone for directions, he succumbs to Catherine’s protests and they pull over to speak to the same man from the opening scene, who has not aged a day even though we can tell this part of the film is set at least 10 years later. We’ve managed to make it a whole 8 minutes since the last insanity break, but I feel it’s necessary that I stop and try to communicate just how absurd this exchange is, despite how futile I know my efforts will be. The exchange takes place primarily between Catherine and the man, who continuously badgers them to buy some of his cider with this growly, stuttery accent that he doesn’t use at any point in the rest of the film. In fact, he seems to have 3 accents at various points. First, in the narration in the opening scene he appears to be trying for something like a Texan accent by way of Michael Caine, then transitioning to this deranged pervert character that seems like he’s in a one-man competition to outham himself, and finally a fairly normal accent throughout the rest of the film. This serves no purpose, of course. Nothing in this scene serves any purpose but to creep the family out as he tries desperately to get them to consume his “cider” or his “lemonade” which both undermines his vaguely established motivations and never gets brought up throughout the rest of the film. It’s hard to put into words how strange and pointless this scene is, but it sets the stage for what to expect for the rest of the film.

Moving on, they decide to camp out for a night before heading to the farm when one of their tents catches fire causing them to get burned because much like burlap sacks, it’s really hard to get out of a tent. You’ve got to undo a zipper and everything, by that point you might as well just give up and let yourself burn to death. This leads them to come to the farm looking for help for the burns when they encounter poor man’s Leatherface, sorry, I mean “The Boy With The Melted Face” (Sam Lane) who is dragging around a chainsaw by a chain when they’re flanked by the cider guy, who shoots one of them with a shotgun, but don’t worry they’re fine because untreated shotgun wounds are just a minor inconvenience in this film. They then flee behind some thin metal scaffolding as cider guy uses his best stormtrooper aim to continuously shoot the scaffolding without harming them until he runs out of bullets before most of the family gets cornered by Melty Face Boy and Curtis gets pitchforked through the taint, leading to their capture. They then get locked into metal cages that are somehow only electrified on the doors even though they’re metal doors connected to metal cages and that’s not how electricity works and they get branded so if there are any other cannibal farmers in the area, they know where to return them. Then there’s a scene where cider guy, who is revealed to be Hunt Hanson (Barrington De La Roche), the owner of the cannibal farm, tells them about how he got revenge on the family of the boys who disfigured his son, including shooting one of them from with a shotgun from hundreds of yards away, presumably back when his aim was better, but don’t worry they’re fine because untreated shotgun wounds are still just a minor inconvenience in this movie.

I’m just going to stop with the plot now. The absurdity continues throughout, giving the sense that the entire production was made up as they went along, with disjointed visual and audio choices and half a dozen twists that manage to be both predictable and completely implausible. There are moments of joy to be had, particularly in some of the campy gore moments and the acting itself isn’t awful, just hobbled by some painfully contrived and melodramatic writing. Don’t watch this movie on your own. I tried and I had to take a break and have a couple drinks before I could finish the damn thing. If you want to derive any enjoyment out of this cobbled together mess of incoherent scenes and ideas, get some people together and make a night of riffing the hell out of this thing. That sounds like it could be fun. There is safety in numbers and no one should venture forth into the cannibal farm alone.