PRESERVATION

Preservation Movie Review

Wit Neary (Wrenn Schmidt), her husband Mike (Aaron Staton), and his brother Sean (Pablo Schreiber of Orange Is The New Black) go hiking in the woods, but are soon terrorized by a group of killers. I'll get to the good before the bad--Schmidt does a decent job as the nervous woman turned survivor. Some of the death scenes are kind of okay. The killers are...not what you expect, which is some parts good, other parts absolutely awful.

They look like this...and ride bicycles 



Okay, so this is kind of a spoiler, but the "twist" of this movie is the killers are teenagers--though I'm sure you probably figured that out when you read they ride bicycles. That in and of itself is not enough to ruin this movie. What is, however, is their seeming invincibility (when it's convenient, of course). The aforementioned Sean is a former military veteran who, at one point, hits one of the kids in the head with the butt of his rifle probably five or six times. Not only does the killer get up as if nothing happened, Sean doesn't have enough sense (keep in mind, he is trained in hand to hand combat) to be sure the guy is unarmed, dead, unconscious, or any of the above. Instead, he turns his back on him. Another scene sees a kid rebound from an absolute beating as if nothing has happened. At first I thought perhaps the masks made them invincible, but alas, this is not the case. It's scene after scene of this, and horrible subplots that go nowhere, along with unlikable characters, that make this movie difficult to sit through. The pursuit of the killers in the end is completely unbelievable and ridiculous, though the kid interrupting a killing to answer a call from his mom was entertaining. I had high hopes for this film (for whatever reason) but Preservation ultimately comes off as a weird mix of Eden Lake and Wrong Turn, only nowhere near as good as either.

On A Scale Of One To Ten: 4

Preservation Movie Trailer