Rating: ***
starring: Jon Owens, Allie Brennan, Andy Brown
You gotta love the motivation a single handheld camera gives to a group of aspiring (sometimes "wannabe") horror maestros. By the time the late 80s introduced SOV marketing, the horror genre soon became a hot spot for kids with camcorders who wanted to do their own film, a tradition obviously still alive today, kicking and waving in the middle of the road flagging for our attention.
Now the question here is this; is this film flagging at us worth the stop? Or should we just ran it over like roadkill? Most of the time, it's the later, but then there are those that makes good company in a lonely trip.Deadly Detour's your average home-made slasher movie, with tons of cheap blood, cheap gore, muffled audio that drops up and down from time to time, bad lighting and weird editing, telling the tale of a group of teens venturing into the woods where they'll be picked off one by one by the "Goatman", who actually is just a deformed guy guy in overalls and brandishing an assortment of weapons. (mostly a machete) With a plot s basic as the next killer-in-the-backwoods type of assortment, what Deadly Detour has that most of these shot-on-video failed to do is that it managed to satisfy all our exploitation needs.
First of is the gore; the guys over Maniac Films (the indie company responsible for this, their feature debut) put a lot of effort of making the nasties as nasty as possible. We got gallons of fake blood and buckets of latex meat strewn around as the killer mutant, deformed guy mauls, dismembers, and in occasion, abort a pregnant lady and strangles her with her own umbilical chord. It's mean-spirited yet imaginative and cheap enough to enjoy.
And then there's the pacing and direction of the film; though the plot development is dulled down by the average acting and cheesy script, it's never boring and it moves along quite nicely with some interesting turns here and there, and some gross-out moments that's laughably horrid. We also got some T and A, which would have been a fine piece of rack if she wasn't riding some fat dude over some jazzy porno music. (Still, could have been worse, right? For all we know, we could had two fat people making out fucking...) 
Lastly, we got the final act scene in this movie that was kinda reminiscent of the same level of taboo-breaking one particular Troma movie had involving massacring children. (Beware: Children at Play (1989) for those who couldn't guess) It was a nasty piece of work, but the fact that it is awful and so darn cheap tones down the bad taste for me, and I just couldn't stop chuckling on how horrid and uncomfortable it was!Deadly Detour is everything you would expect in a do-it-yourself horror film; the ineptness of the production is ever present but you can easily forgive these shortcomings thanks to the acceptable entertainment value it has. If you're a grue and gore fan who's easily satisfied with loads of fake blood and double-digit bodycounts, then this movie's a high recommendation for a rental or two! Try it out!
odycount:
1 female found bloodied, dies
1 female mauled in half offscreen
1 male gutted with machete
1 male gets an arrow through the head, exits to the mouth
1 female stabbed to death with broken bottle
1 male neck sliced open with machete
1 male shredded through car engine
1 female impaled through steel rod
1 female head stomped
1 male hacked on the chest with a thrown axe
1 male gets a nailed baseball bat to the head
1 male gets a nailed baseball bat to the head
1 male disemboweled with machete
1 girl hacked with machete
1 male chest sliced open with machete
1 pregnant female womb stomped, strangled with her own umbilical chord
1 female throat cut with machete
2 females hacked on the head with same machete
1 male skewered with white cane
1 male walking stick to the eye
1 female beaten to death with baseball bat
1 female hacked with machete
total: 23