Boy, a lot of the midnight movies were period pieces. Outlaws and Angels was a western, Under the Shadows was in the ’80s. 31 was 1976 and this is 1978. Carnage Park is a well acted and well directed survival horror thriller, but never quite transcends past what we’ve already seen before.
Vivian Fontaine (Ashley Bell) is taken hostage in a bank robbery by Scorpion Joe (James Landry Hebert). During his escape, Joe drives them onto the property of Wyatt (Pat Healy), a sniper who likes to hunt trespassers in Carnage Park. So now Vivian goes on the run trying to survive Carnage Park and escape Wyatt.
Bell gives another full bodied performance, completely in control of her physicality as a traumatized hostage forced to fight for survival. Healy makes Wyatt smug and condescending, in his own world and God help anyone who enters. Keeping the film in daylight is effective as it maintains a brown desert look that is very stark. Writer/director Mickey Keating’s editing is tight too, from the opening titles zooming by to the rhythm of the score, to the high impact bullet impacts from Wyatt’s rifle.
It’s just the park is never that interesting a location. It’s no funhouse of Jigsaw. It’s not even a hideout worthy of The Collector. The further into it Vivian goes, the less interesting it gets. She encounters other victims in various stages of distress but mostly finds a lot of storage rooms. It’s all real stuff, mostly military it seems, which makes sense for Wyatt’s gun fetish. But it’s hard to get too scared of supplies. Maybe a few of them have modifications but it doesn’t seem like Wyatt invented anything himself.
There is a decent amount of gore. The other survivors Vivian encounters are caught in some nasty spots, and the splatter from some of those headshots is impressive. Maybe I’m being ungrateful, taking for granted that a movie can present this intensity, but I kind of wanted more.
So Carnage Park is a perfectly fine story of a woman going from frying pan to fire. It’s well made, just in comparison to some of the real discoveries of Sundance, it fails to stand out.