Jacob

Slasher movies don't get much worse than this one from writer-director Larry Wade Carrell, who also plays a drunken stepfather whose mistreatment of his wife and little stepdaughter leads his hulking stepson Jacob—a mentally-limited gentle giant—to kill him and then tangle with a slew of cracker vigilantes who pursue Jacob with their rifles. Told in flashback by the sheriff to a boy he has caught trespassing at the abandoned “house of horrors” where all the bloodletting occurred years earlier, the story is typical American Gothic pulp, poorly acted and unremarkably filmed. What is likely to most irritate genre fans, however, is that Carrell takes an unconscionably long time to reach the mayhem, wasting fully half of the movie on backstory featuring Michael Biehn (as Jacob's biological dad) and footage of Carrell—an incredibly amateurish actor—trying to be convincing as a hayseed drunk before getting his just deserts at Jacob's hands (in a hilariously inept scene). Not recommended. (F. Swietek)