Even a low-rent Sasquatch like the Jersey Devil, a ravenous winged beast reputed to haunt the Pinelands in the south of the Garden State, deserves a better showcase than this bargain-basement horror movie by director Dale Fabrigar. Clocking in at little more than an hour, its brevity might be cause for complaint were it not for the fact that even at little more than seventy minutes it feels cruelly overlong.
It begins with three college chums—Sarah (Sasha Anne), her cousin Kelsey (Madison Ekstrand) and the latter’s boyfriend Alex (Evan Adams)—involved in an RV crash from which Sarah and Alex emerge relatively unscathed while Kelsey simply disappears, presumed dead.
Sarah becomes convinced that Kelsey is still alive, carried off by the legendary Jersey Devil, and convinces Alex to drive back with her to the crash site at Reed’s Point to search for clues. There they hire local guide Hank (Anthony Jensen) to take them into the woods—a bad idea. Alex falls down a hill and gets his leg impaled on a tree limb, and while Hank trudges back to his truck for a saw to cut him loose, Sarah wanders off and finds an isolated house where handsome Eric (Joseph Almani) invites her in; he turns out to be a self-styled Jersey Devil researcher. Meanwhile, Hank frees Alex and takes him back to town.
At this point the plot sickens, with the screenwriters, unable to decide whether the picture should be an old-fashioned monster movie or a mystery involving some sort of land dispute, opt to make it both. The locals are not what they seem, and both Sarah and Alex repeatedly find themselves in dire danger (poor Adams, who seems an amiable enough fellow, gets the worst of it, being clobbered, drugged, tied up, and shot as well as impaled on that tree). The fate of Kelsey is revealed, but not to anyone’s satisfaction, and to increase the body count for no particular reason Sarah’s friend Maxine (Julia Kelly) comes looking for her, meeting a grisly fate. A closing “gotcha” moment is cribbed from innumerable other pictures.
With a threadbare production and performances that might charitably be described as rudimentary—especially by Anne, who barely seems able to recite her lines, let alone evince any emotion—this Jersey Devil throwback to the terrible teens-in-peril monster movies of the fifties might find a place in an extensive collection of horror movies but would be more suitable on a shelf devoted to bad cinema or an episode of Mystery Science Theater.