Ferguson Takes One For The Team Presents: The Devil's Ground

The Devil’s Ground
(AKA The Cycle)

Daryl Hannah!

Praise be the sweet and precious David Lee Roth years of Daryl Hannah, she began by providing us with an abundance of mermaid side boob, she taught us caveman Kama sutra, she was even a friggin roboslut!

She slipped into the shadows for a while and returned with a roar in her more adult and rockin Hagar Years as the one-eyed super killer!

Sadly we now have Daryl Hannah’s Gary Cherone years. Oh, the bitter taste of Halen III.
So bad indeed.
Hey look, a bird!

The cover promised me so much with a picture of some face that looked like an uncorrected Meg Ryan pic, or perhaps Daryl Hannah after a date with Chris Brown. Ya, it coulda went either way on that one. However (and here’s the spoiler warning) Daryl looks nothing like that in the actual movie, in fact she looks completely normal.

Let’s get a few things out of the way first off, this IS NOT a slasher flick (as it is often described as such) by any stretch of the imagination. The killer(s) (oops did I ruin something for you?) carry and use a shotgun to kill with. Well, I don’t know, maybe I should fact check some more. Is a shotgun considered a knife in Canada? It’s really just a bad attempt at putting a spin on the overly done backwoods killers hunt down and kill the twenty somethings. And the ‘spin’ part is NOT any sort of improvement, it’s more like crooked teeth on a fat chick, it ain’t a deal breaker, but hell, it ain’t doing her any favors either.

Alright, so here’s the rundown and yes if you don’t want to know the ending then don’t read cuz I’m gonna reveal all the juicy Canadian secrets! I feel so naughty, spank me Avril! Daryl Hannah is driving on back roads and picks up a girl with a few smears of blood on her cheeks and the rest of the story unfolds as this girl, Amy Singer (played by Leah Gibson) recounts her wacky adventures in the woods. Oddly the annoying girl tells the story much like a badly written teen fantasy novel (I’m looking directly at you, Stephanie Meager).

So, her story goes as such: A small group of ‘environmentalists’ with nice new sweat shop cloths and huge diamond earrings travel out into the woods of pseudo-Pennsylvania while listening to some crappy Skynyrd rip-off band. So, why are they there? Oh, who cares, what you need to know is how hard they try to make it look like the Texas Chainsaw remake. Then they start getting killed off one by one, but most of the time they try really damn hard not sound incredibly Canadian. A little advice if I may, it’s ‘About’, not ‘A Boot’, just in case you guys were wondering. Magically they are also Anthropologists/Archaeologists, you see as they find human remains, they dig up the entire site, logging and categorizing everything. Wow, Canadians can do anything! Bird! Keep in mind NONE of these guys own a cell phone. Really? Not even one? Did some Amish kid write this? I guess it is Pennsylvania right?

Quickly a crazed Canadian backwoods version of Mushmouth appears and drives an RV into one of the blonde girls, you know the one that’s not as hot as the other one. Death by RV sounds pretty damn cool, but it’s not. It was really stupid and I feel a little bit dumber for having witnessed it. This killer is played by a guy named Twan Holliday. I gotta give credit where it’s due and Twan was pretty badass, how in the hell he and Rob Zombie haven’t made a movie together yet is beyond me. Too bad this movie wasn’t just Twan and Daryl, now that has got some potential!

There’s another killer, it’s the OTHER backwoods guy. Well, let’s see there are two guys out in rural not-quite-Pennsylvania and they are brothers, so they must both be crazy killers, right? About forty minutes of pointless Saving Private Ryan quick shutter running later and we are down to one last girl. Oh, look a bird. Some uninspired deaths and SHOT AFTER SHOT OF BIRDS! Half the footage for this film was apparently taken from the local bird watching society. To be honest even if you have a crippling fear of birds, this movie won’t even make you flinch. But it may turn the weaker of you on with massive amounts of full frontal bird nudity. These ain’t your shaved American birds, nor are they California landing strips, we’re talking French-Canadian all natural Celine Dion Shaggy Meat Wallets. Yee-Haw!

In the end we find that the girl telling this pathetic story is in fact NOT a girl but rather some ghost that accidentally wandered off of Ghost Whisperers set and decided to pay Daryl Hannah a visit. When I die you can bet the first place I’ll be going is straight to Daryl Hannah’s Volvo! Or maybe Uwe Boll’s medicine cabinet. Do you think he has sensitive teeth? Does he whiten them? Athletes foot perhaps? Oh god I wish I knew! Anyway, ya, the chick was dead all along and wanted Daryl to know hear her lame-ass story and finish her communist works, but in the end Daryl dies too. And we are all left feeling like we just watched an episode of Goosebumps. Even the meaty colossal hairy moles on R.L. Stines face wrote scarier stuff than this! This movie relies more on scaring you with things like bad continuity, thin dialogue and weepy angst ridden brow furrowing than anything really scary, like maple leaves! You will not be able to handle the kinds of Canadian horror these kids are dishing out so don’t even attempt it. Stick with truly scary things like swamps and Kate Hudson. Hey look a bird!

The main chick is key to the success of these things and this one did everything she could to make me want her dead! It’s actually really satisfying when you find out she’s really been dead this whole time, because if she had survived I’d be pissed. Well, more pissed than I already am because there weren’t enough birds in this movie! But the true winner of this whole thing is of course our own Daryl Hannah who walks away with the easy paycheck. Well done D.H., you are a true guiding light in our otherwise pallid world.

That wasn’t too painful right? Well then, as it stands this movie ranks a 7 out of 10 on the Uwe Boll-omiter, which caused stabbing pain in my left ear canal and dry mouth. There may have been some kind of aching involved, but I’m not sure I was too busy watching some tubular bird footage!

Why you shouldn’t see this movie: That main chick is annoying as hell, the faces she makes are just ridiculous!

Why you should see this movie: That main chick is funny as hell, the faces she makes are just hilarious!

6 degrees to Uwe! And yes, I will take the easiest one.

Daryl Hannah from The Devil’s Ground was in Kill Bill 1 & 2 with Michael Madsen.
Mike Madsen was in Bloodrayne by Uwe MFing Boll!