Director – Jared Cohn, Screenplay – Paul Logan, Producers – Doreen Bennett, Joel M. Bennett, Gabriel Campisi, Paul Logan, Devin Reeve & Beth A. Thuna, Photography – Laura Beth Love, Music – Michael John Mollo, Title Theme Music – Scott Rockenfield, Visual Effects Supervisor – Steve Clarke, Special Effects Supervisor – Neil Smith, Makeup Effects – Morb-X FX Lab (Supervisor – Eric Fox), Production Design – Miranda Robinson. Production Company – 313 Films/Razors Edge Productions/Traplight Media.
Cast
Paul Logan (John Crenshaw), Costas Mandylor (Cylus Atkinson), Tiffany Brouwer (Selina Duboix), Sydney Sweeney (Hailey Summers), Thomas Ochoa (Riley St. Claire), John Omohundro (Derrick Manning), Bill Moseley (Jacob Sutter), Vernon Wells (Earl), Jack David Frank (Chris Abrams), Elisabeth Ferrara (Sheila Perry), Matthew Willig (Stone), Nestor Serrano (Sheriff Randall Clay), Frankie Ray (Razor), Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson (War Veteran), Zachary Goodspeed (Charlie), Amanda Godepski (Rachel)
Plot
Teacher Selina Duboix takes a classroom of five students up to Sapphire Lake on a nature photography course. Her boyfriend, ex-Navy SEAL John Crenshaw, was intending to take the day to propose to her and quickly agrees to drive them up there. At the lake, they set up camp and set about taking photos. They then run into a town of degenerate in-breds who live there and have been poisoned by a uranium mine in the area. The townspeople are led by escaped criminal Cylus Atkinson and his associates who have turned the town into a meth lab. Selina and the students are now imprisoned to be tortured and cooked for meat by the townspeople. It is up to John, thought killed, to use his military training to save the others.
The Horde – which should not be confused with the excellent French zombie film The Horde (2009) – is written and co-produced by its lead actor Paul Logan. Logan is a karate black belt who entered the film industry in the late 1990s, appearing in everything from erotic thrillers to a regular on Days of Our Lives (1965- ) and a host of B-budget films, including playing Dracula in Way of the Vampire (2005), along with a bunch of films for The Asylum and several other films for director Jared Cohn. Logan has produced several other films he has starred in such as Skookum: The Hunt for Bigfoot (2016), Facade (2020) and Loss of Grace (2020), although has not written any other scripts.
The Horde is a standard Backwoods Brutality film. The teacher and group of pupils innocently wandering into the lair of the backwoods in-breds are little different from the standard victim line-up in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), while the in-breds mutated by radiation brings this close to the remake of The Hills Have Eyes (2006). The film soon gets into all the torturous nastiness of this type of film – Sydney Sweeney has her hands nailed to bench face down “just like Jesus”, Thomas Ochoa has his tongue cut out and then his leg removed with a buzzsaw by Vernon Wells etc.
However, the presence of Paul Logan and especially his writing the film as a vanity vehicle ends up distorting The Horde. The way Logan writes his own character, he casts himself as all but a superhero without a costume – he is an ex-Navy SEAL; we first meet him with his shirt off to reveal a perfect set of abs. With chiselled jaw and rugged looks, Logan looks exactly like some comic-book artist’s caricature of a hero. This is exactly what the character is – a fantasy of hyper-competence who is always there to stop the reckless teenagers falling over a cliff, offer words of common sense and go and kick ass when the group needs rescuing. Not to mention, he is patriotic and stands up to needlingly awful teen Thomas Ochoa in favour of those who did their duty. As though aware that his character needs some flaws, Logan makes him awkward when it comes to proposing to Tiffany Brouwer – even so, he manages to pull off the perfect occasion leaving romantic notes and a trail of rose petals to the riverside where he awaits her with picnic blanket and champagne.
Paul Logan (l) vs backwoods crazy
The problem with Paul Logan’s vanity vehicle that casts him as a heroic action star and all round decent guy is that this sits alongside a script that wades well into
Torture Porn territory. And okay, the idea of a Backwoods Brutality film where a typical action hero wades in to kick butt up against the standard Leatherface equivalent is filled with amusing possibilities. However, the crucial problem that this gives The Horde is that once Paul Logan wades into action and starts kicking hillbilly ass and slaughtering people wholesale amid a good deal of bloodshed, there is little difference between the two sides. It seems incongruous to cast a virtuous and noble action man in a film fighting murderous, sadistic, degenerate backwoods hillbillies and then for both sides to be engaging in equal amounts of bloodshed, brutality and torture.
Jared Cohn is operating on a B-budget but clearly more than he usually gets with his films with The Asylum. It is enough to bring on board a handful actors who have some name including Costas Mandylor and Nestor Serrano. There is also Sydney Sweeney whose name started to rise subsequent to the film in tv shows like Euphoria (2021- ) and The White Lotus (2021- ). And the film does get in some appearances from actors with a genre history – Bill Moseley as a bar owner, Vernon Wells as one of the backwoods characters, while 90s martial arts star Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson, looking quite old, turns up as a war veteran whose realises a kinship with Paul Logan.
Director Jared Cohn first appeared for The Asylum with Born Bad (2011) and has become a prolific director for them with the likes of Bikini Spring Break (2012), Hold Your Breath (2012), 12/12/12 (2012), Atlantic Rim (2013), Jailbait (2014), Bound (2015), Evil Nanny (2016), Little Dead Rotting Hood (2016), King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (2017), Alien Predator (2018), Atlantic Rim: Resurrection (2018), Shark Season (2020), Super Volcano (2022), 20.0 Megaquake (2022) and Ice Storm (2023), while moving out on his own with Underground Lizard People (2011), Buddy Hitchins (2015), Hulk Blood Tapes (2015), Death Pool (2017), The Domicile (2017), Halloween Pussy Trap Kill Kill (2017), Devil’s Revenge (2018) and Swim (2021).