In short: Carnage Park (2016)

A very bad day at the small town bank trying to get life-saving money out of an ass turns even worse for farmer’s daughter Vivian (Ashley Bell) when she is taken hostage by Tarantino wash-out gangster “Scorpion” Joe Clay (James Landry Hébert). Joe Clay’s day then gets even worse – though much shorter - than hers when his partner dies from wounds incurred during their little bank heist and he ends up driving them right into the territory of a Vietnam vet serial killer (Pat Healy) with a rifle and a nasty streak.

Of course, it’s Vivian who will have to survive a series of chases and fights against the madman, through the desert, the kind of ramshackle huts all movie killers love, as well as some really unhealthy looking mines. Fortunately, she will turn out to be rather tougher than she looks.

All of the movies of director Mickey Keating seem to be made with a pretty specific model of a different genre and period style in mind. In Carnage Park’s case, we are quite obviously in the land of 70s exploitation horror cinema. Keating, despite production design quite in the proper grimy style, and using a digital colour scheme meant to evoke the yellowing prints many of us have watched movies of the era in, is not a mere imitator either here or in any of his films, always using elements, details in the characterization, and so on that ground his films very much in the decade they are made in instead of going for exclusive retro cool.

Keating’s editing style is certainly of our time, his use of cross-cutting to short flashbacks pretty much the opposite of period approaches to storytelling, his editing making the film’s pacing much faster than typical of the 70s. To my eyes, rather than being retro, the film seems to create a sort of dream-version of 70s horror that mixes some of the best of that decade’s style with some of the best of today’s.


Carnage Park is certainly one of the director’s less abstract movies, really going all-out in telling a traditionally exciting tale, using some of the somewhat psychedelic visual tricks for exploring his female protagonist’s inner life that seem central to his other films, but ending up with a rather more straightforward suspense piece than one might expect going in. That’s not a criticism, mind you, for while I do like my abstract arthouse horror, a rather well-done exercise in suspense by a director usually tending to abstract arthouse horror is a nice thing, too. Particularly since Keating turns out to be rather good at this sort of thing too, adding a more direct sense of tension his other movies tend to lack. Why, he even makes a climax that’s mostly taking place in the dark work as much more than a statement of intent.