Director/Screenplay/Producer – Charlie Steeds, Photography – Michael Lloyd, Music – Sam Benjafield. Production Company – Dark Temple Motion Pictures.
Cast
Kate Marie Davies (Jessica Harver), Barrington de la Roche (Hunt Hansen), Rowena Bentley (Katherine Harver), Toby Wynn-Davies (Wesley Wallace), David Lenik (Toby Harver), Joe Street (Kurt Daniels), Dylan Curtis (Sam Harver), Peter Gosgrove (Everett Blackheart), Sam Lane (The Boy With the Melted Face), Jackson Wright (Reverend Hawkesworth), Kate Llewellyn (Big Betty), Charlotte Roest-Ellis (Bethany Hansen)
Plot
Wesley Wallace takes his wife Katherine and her three children, along with daughter Jessica’s boyfriend Kurt, for a vacation. They head to the remote Hansen Farm in a camper van. However, while they are parked in a field during the night, someone sets fire to the tent. They head to the nearby farmhouse for help but the owner Hunt Hansen shoots at Wesley with a shotgun. The group are placed in electrified cages in the barn. They learn Hunt Hansen’s history, how his wife killed herself after local bullies set their son’s face alight and Hunt’s mind snapped with grief. They discover that he is planning to sell their flesh to a mysterious benefactor known only as The Meat Eater.
Charlie Steeds is a British director who has had a busy output of other low-budget horror films from the latter half of the 2010s onwards. He first appeared with the painfully bad Deadman Apocalypse (2016) but quickly moved to strength with the likes of The House of Violent Desires (2018), Winterskin (2018), The Barge People (2019), A Werewolf in England (2020), Death Ranch (2020), An English Haunting (2020), Vampire Virus (2020), Werewolf Castle (2021), Freeze (2022), The Haunting of the Tower of London (2022) and Gods of the Deep (2024).
Escape from Cannibal Farm is a Backwoods Brutality film, a genre that began in the 1970s with works such as Straw Dogs (1971), Deliverance (1972), The Last House on the Left (1972) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). It was a genre rooted very much in the sense of an in-bred rural America and its murderous resentments of the carefree social liberties of the Love Generation. It seems odd here to see that social divide translated to England. Certainly, the very first Backwoods Brutality film Straw Dogs was located in Cornwall, but British filmmakers have never had much subsequent success in translating the basics there. It seems that the idea of rural England vs the trendy youth generation doesn’t seem to work so well in a country where many of the social divides derive from inherited privilege vs the working classes.
Escape from Cannibal Farm holds unmistakeable allegiance to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in terms of its plot set-up of a group venturing onto a backwoods farm while travelling in a van/RV. The homage becomes particularly overt when it comes to the mute, chainsaw-wielding maniac attacking the group while wearing a mask taken from other people’s sliced-off faces. Not to mention, Steeds names the patriarch of the household Hansen after Gunnar Hansen who played the original Leatherface, while one of the kids is named Toby after Texas Chain Saw director Tobe Hooper.
Peter Cosgrove as Everett Blackheart, the Leatherface lookalike
Charlie Steeds delivers a quite decent variant on the Backwoods Brutality film. He spends time with the characters who are all given much more rounded edges than usual in these films – we see them in a state of almost constant bickering as they set out. There is the odd amusing line “I’m a vegan.” “What? From Star Trek (1966-9?”
The latter half begins to expand on The Texas Chain Saw basics, including it being revealed there was a set-up to lure the group there and secret societies that relish cannibalism, as well as a complicated backstory, along with a number of surprises and twists. Charlie Steeds delivers the brutality side of things with a nasty kick – often characters will make an escape only to have their newfound freedom turned around on them – and a savagery that the Texas Chain Saw sequels have spent the last thirty odd years trying to recapture.
