Boy, you have to give this home-movie-level, bottom-of-the-barrel amateur production credit for trying. They really tried *hard* to make a good movie. They had absolutely no idea how to, and they couldn't find anyone with any acting chops, but they clearly were trying hard.
Plot: People are trapped in a house in the woods by an energy field circling the area. When they die, they wake up wherever they were first killed when they entered the area. The woods are full of human-like creatures, represented by people in costume-shop cloaks and black and white makeup, who either want to eat them, transform themselves into exact duplicates of them, or steal their gasoline, I'm not sure, sometimes crawl instead of walking for some reason, and drool black goo. The occupants of the house are trying to start up a mysterious machine that they believe will lower the barrier, without getting themselves killed too many times.
Why are they afraid of the creatures if they just wake up again every time they're killed? Why does the woman insist, "It's the lights that keep them away, not the blinds... leave the blinds open", yet leave the lampshade on the lamp she's placing in the window? Why do the humanoids crawl instead of walking? Why do people keep waking up again after being killed? What is that black goop, anyway? These and many other mysteries are never answered.
This movie is 90 minutes long and feels like 3 hours. They're in the house arguing. They're running from the hooded figures menacing them in the woods. Someone shows up at the house, stays a bit, is tricked into going outside as they other occupants yell, "Don't go outside!", gets eaten. Rinse and repeat.
Then, for the last 5 minutes, comes The Special Effects Sequence. They must've blown the entire budget of this no-budget movie on hiring a real editor and special FX person to put together this home movie version of the "2001: A Space Odyssey" video montage. No, really, I was impressed.
I'm honestly not sure what category to put this in. They tried a little too hard to make a good movie—failed abysmally, but tried—for me to feel good calling it "trash". It's a little too derivative (Night Of The Living Dead, The Omega Man, pretty much everything that exists because Richard Matheson wrote "I Am Legend" in the '50s) for me to say "It's different, at least". And I can't say "Bad but I liked it" because, er, I didn't like it, so much as I was, um, sort of weirdly fascinated by how hard they tried and how badly they failed. I guess I'll go with "trash" and "different".
But above all, wow, is this a stunningly bad movie.
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