Revenge is a dish best served by something other than a giant flesh-ripping slime-beast from Hell conjured by a backwoods black magic ritual. That sort of thing doesn’t work out well for anyone.
Yep, this is one of those movies in which an old legend passed around among barefoot hicks—every character caked under a layer of dirt, every pickup truck a gruff-engine’d old beater—turns out to be 100% true. I don’t want to spoil the clever twist that leads to the resolution, but it’s a good one that makes sense and that stays true to the ultimate theme of horror stories, which is that when some awful shit happens and people indulge in their darkest side to fight it, nobody ever wins. This movie is lean and mean.
Genre movie favorite Lance Henriksen blows it away in the lead role as a loving single father pushed to the edge when his son is killed in an accident that involves some dirt-biking young jerk-offs. The director is special effects whiz Stan Winston (The Terminator, Aliens) and the film, appropriately, looks great. The dripping, evil-eyed, freaky proportioned monster here competes with anything else that was happening during this fertile period for practical effects. This is a good one. Followed by a series of sequels, of course.