Don't be fooled by the Haute Tension inspired cover art that Lion's Gate has slapped on the front of the box for this release - Motor Home Massacre is not a stylish, slick, tense, scary slasher like they'd have you believe, it's a 'dumbed down' and by the numbers low budget quickie that delivers little more than a couple of mediocre gore scenes and some bad performances.

When the movie begins, a young man and his girlfriend are slaughtered by an unseen maniac prowling the woods where they've setup their tent for the night. A second girl, Nicole, escapes and tears off into the forest in search of safety. Cut to the next day and we've got your typical group of cliché ridden teenagers ready to take their motor home into the same forest where we just saw the murder take place for a weekend of partying, loving, drinking and more partying.

As our intrepid teens hit the road, things take an ominous turn when they stop at general store for supplies only to meet a creepy shopkeeper who warns them of what goes on out in them there words where they be headed and through some conveniently placed flashbacks we learn more about what happened to Nicole and her friends that night and hints are dropped that the killer might just be the poor girl's ex-boyfriend with an axe, or rather a machete, to grind.

This tale of terror does next to nothing to deter our campers and before you can say gratuitous nudity they're setting up on the very same campsite that the murder took place on. While all of this is going on, a man with a wooden leg is wandering around and checking out the scene, trying to put a few things together in hopes of preventing more killings and succeeding only in spooking the kids in the process. Of course, later that night who should show up at the camp site but Nicole, who has been running around in the woods alone all this while, and it's here that we realize that there might be more to this girl than we first thought. Then the murders start back up again…

Motor Home Massacre shows some promise for first time director Allen Wilbanks, but unfortunately suffers from a pretty poor script (which Wilbanks also wrote), a retarded twist ending, and some horrible characters who show up only to serve as fodder for the killer. The guy obviously knows how to pace a film and he sets things up well enough but when the movie is filled with amateurish performances hinged on some truly unlikable characters – and when you don't care about the characters, it's hard to care about the movie. The campers who show up in the motor home are lame, it's that simple. We could care less about them as they're either annoying or such a slasher film stereotype that we either know they're going to die or we want them to die, and either way, there's no suspense because of this. Add to that the fact that they seem to have little to nothing in common and probably wouldn't be hanging out with one another in the first place and you've got a pretty uninspired set of victims.

The movie starts off well enough, the opening scene in which Nicole takes off and her 'new friends' meet their maker is handled well in that it sets up the story nicely. From there, however, we're left with a bunch of annoying people and once we are we more or less wait for them to die. This does result in a couple of decent kills scenes with some moderately impressive gore effects but without the suspense needed, it's all very much a waste of time. It's a shame it turned out this way as Wilbank's seems to have had his heart in the right place. He managed to work some great locations into the film and he does pace things well. Here's hoping next time he'll have some better actors to work with and a more interesting script to shoot.