Get this... the movie is like a cross between The Evil Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the Jersey Devil myth thrown in for good measure. It stars horror veterans Felissa Rose, Edwin Neal, and Ellen Sandweiss. Sounds like the recipe for a really superb horror flick, right?...WRONG!!!!! Satan's Playground proves that a great premise and good cast will only take a movie so far and not save it, in any way, from being a stinker. Absolutely brimming with horror cliché's and cheap thrills, this movie took a lot of good potential and tossed it out the window.The film is about a couple who are headed out into the woods for a nice little camping trip with their mentally-challenged son and the wife's sister in tote. While on the road they, OF COURSE, have car trouble. After getting stuck in the mud, the man goes for help and finds an old, creepy house out in the woods. The house, OF COURSE, belongs to a family of bloodthirsty devil-worshiping killers.Do I really need to continue further? About the only good thing this movie had going for it was the atmosphere and cinematography. It was genuinely creepy and evil. The set-pieces were great, too. The director could have taken that and run with it a lot further. It was prevented by bad writing, bad acting, and all those annoying stereotypical situations. It reminded me of a cheap horror movie that would be made around the early-mid 90s before horror started to self-realize a lot.Overall, it's a very trite and lackluster effort.

A family in New Jersey drives along an isolated road, and the father is falling asleep at the wheel. His wife (I thought at first she was his daughter) mainly bitches at him, and he falls asleep two or three times since nobody has the sense to replace him behind the wheel. Their station wagon gets stuck in mud alongside a road. They're unable to push it out and don't try to put anything under the wheels for traction. The father walks into the woods to find help for some reason, rather than walking down the road. He comes across a boarded- up house and asks for a phone.What seems like like hours later, the wife (Felissa Rose) goes off in the woods in the same direction. Somehow she winds up at the same house, and asks for the phone. While she had earlier said that her son was foaming at the mouth in the back seat of the car because he was scared and not because of a seizure, at the house she says her autistic eighteen- year-old son was having a seizure. She also says that her husband has seen a house in the woods - he hadn't. The old woman at the house mentions she has thirteen children, two of them living at home, both of them in their forties and retarded.A cop stops by the house. He says there had been some kids dressed up in Halloween costumes outside. He hears Felissa calling for help in the basement, but accepts the old woman's explanation that it's a stray cat. Dumb! He returns to his car, an old beater with a blue light on top. He gets attacked by something from the sky, and these minor injuries apparently kill him. Despite the death of a police officer, later in the movie they send out just one officer and one of the victims to check the house!Back at the car, the sister sees the cop's car parked in front of the station wagon. Why didn't he check the station wagon before going to the house? How did he see the people outside the house when it was far in the woods? How did he return to his car so quickly? This is a movie with lots of writing and continuity problems.Sis leaves her baby in the car when she checks the police car, and naturally it's gone when she returns. She goes into the woods, also manages to come across the same house, and asks to use the phone. She freaks out there, and scares a teenage girl who stopped by the house to use the phone. Surprising the old lady's palm reading business wasn't more popular at such a popular location!The autistic son had gone into the woods also and knocked himself out. He too goes to the house, and eventually gets sucked into the ground, like a character in Tomaselli's Desecration, which is more interesting than this movie!And on it goes. Much of the musical score is quite poor, particularly the instrumental song that is apparently supposed to be playing on the radio. The acting is just execrable, almost all-around. I couldn't say whether this was the casting or the direction of the actors. Ellen Sandweiss is OK, and attractive, but has a small role. There are horror clichés aplenty, like one character finding it easier to jump out what is apparently a third story window, than trying to break through a thin first-story door with a large window in it. The ending is pathetic, a steal from Evil Dead that I suppose is meant as a tribute, but just feels cheap.Avoid!

This movie was so goddamn AWFUL that even thinking about it now makes me wince in pain.The acting is terrible. So...very terrible...not one of the people in this movie can act...Acting is not one of their talents, they have no acting ability, acting is beyond their limited talents, I know dead fish who had more liberating careers yadda yadda. Trust me.The story is really...meh...It's badly written, uninspired and the storyline really is pathetic, disjointed and altogether boring.It has the typical stupid plot points, where people do stupid things and you lose all respect for them as characters.Can I mention the terrible acting again? - It was painful...seriously...I mean...I wish I could find more to complain about but there's so little substance to the film and all the people in it that there's literally nothing left to say about it, apart from, Whatever you do, DO NOT watch this film unless you enjoy the slow and painful melting of your own brain as you sit through the most retarded and pathetic attempt at movie making you will ever witness.I'm doing this to save people from wasting a good 90 minutes of precious, precious life.

What a mess. And I had good feelings, too, after the first five minutes. After a competent, simple POV attack scene I waited with baited breath, anxiously pondering what horrific form the Jersey Devil would take, what terrible possibilities a film like this could play with . . . and the monster totally dropped out of the movie. The next twenty minutes consisted of three people in a car being "dramatic". Still, I thought, ol' Jersey D can't be far away, eh? No. I'm not even gonna lead you on anymore. After the "character" scenes the movie lurches into a load of bushwah about a psychotic backwoods family and a satanic cult, but you shouldn't bother taking notes, because none of it goes anywhere. At all. It's a completely empty movie, no motivation, no story, not even any scares. You could rearrange all of the scenes and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference. And the Jersey Devil stays a POV shot the whole film. But hey, that's "nightmare logic" for you, right? Right?No, it's crap, and Dante Tomaselli should be called out on it. A bad movie's still bad, even if you can wax philosophic about it on your commentary track, and a movie with no plot can't get away with "nightmare logic" (director's words) if there's nothing else for it to fall back on.