Madison County (2011)

Written and Directed by Eric England
Starring Ace Marrero, Nick Principe and Dayton Knoll
Runtime 81min. - Rated R/Unrated on DVD
1 Star (out of 4)

"Madison County" is a bad film. It's going to be hard to expand my opinion beyond that simple sentence, but I will try.

To start with, this is easily one of the most forgettable films I've ever seen. Every scene feels like it's been clumsily reenacted from some other movie, like an 81 minute-long sweded film compilation. I'm sure I'll forget the entire plot of the film within the next month. Pieces like this occupy a tiny space in my mind where bad movies go to mingle with each other, so I remember them all as one confusingly awful brainfart.



The characters are college students investigating the story of a serial killer as a school project. I'm assuming they must attend an uncredited school with very low entry requirements since they are all dumb as rocks. The students set off on this fateful mission because one of them has been receiving letters from an author who wrote a book about the mysterious serial killer. The letters are the only thing fueling the quest. There's no confirmation that the story is true. There's not even evidence that the letters are from the actual author. That doesn't keep them from driving for hours to some remote location. The students' bridge to Madison County is paved with idiocy.

When a movie's main characters are so inept, I always cheer for their demise. I was hoping to see each and every one of these students murdered in the goriest ways imaginable. Those hopes were never realized. Some people were killed, but it was never as gruesome as it should have been. The most brutal scene involved a broken baseball bat shoved through a guy's mouth and out the back of his skull. That was only shown in profile view which made it feel like a cheap special effect.

If you forgo the gore, a serial killer needs to be super scary. The original "Halloween" is a good example of the theory. Not much gore in that film, but Michael Myer's presence sent a shiver up the spines of viewers everywhere. The best that "Madison County" has to offer is a tall lanky dude who wears a pig head and likes to grunt a lot. Furthermore, his motives and origins are never explained. All of the townsfolk are accessories to the murders but that goes unexplained also.

Even for the B-horror purists, "Madison County" falls far short of expectations. Budgets can be selectively ignored if the film is creative and brings something new to the genre. This one doesn't even come close to meeting that requirement. Unfortunately, I can't recommend this movie to anyone. Maybe someone who has a fetish for men wearing pig heads would enjoy it, but I haven't met anyone like that, yet.