Earlier this week I watched Staunton Hill on DVD.  Or to use its official title “Cameron Romero’s Staunton Hill”.   I wasn’t too impressed, and was glad I got it free through Amazon’s Vine programme and didn’t part with money for it.

Cameron Romero is the son of the legendary George A. Romero, who gives it an endorsement on the front cover.  A bit of a warning sign really if the only decent quote you can get for the publicity is from the old man.

Here is what I wrote about it on Amazon:

This film belongs in the ‘gross-out horror’ genre – but really the scales tip a lot more towards the gross-out than the horror.

The mutilation/torture scenes are amongst the goriest and most graphic I have seen, but there is no real suspense to them.

The film follows the template for kids-meet-psychos-in-out-of-the-way-location films as laid out in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and copied by countless films since.  The difference is that it has a bit of a retro feel to it.  Apparently it is set in 1969 and it has the look and pace of a 1970s film.   At the beginning I thought this was a good thing, making a difference to the MTV-style editing of many recent films, but it didn’t have the story to capitalise on that.

The director is obviously technically talented, as he should be given his background, so this film should have been so much better – it could not have got a lot worse!

Maybe he should have stayed out of Hostel/Saw/Wrong Turn territory and gone for the zombie genre instead.