DEADWOOD PARK gets brownie points from me simply for starting at a drive-in, and featuring the beautiful ruins of an amusement park, too. It helps that it’s a smart, ambitious, densely plotted, mysterious film that is successful at conveying an atmospheric sense of impending dread.
Jake, played by William Clifton, goes back to his childhood home, after it’s sat untended for years.
In flashback we learn that his twin was abducted by the child-killer who’d been terrorizing the area for years. It was hushed up, the guy never was caught, and a local eccentric was thought to be responsible by most townsfolk. But some know better.
Jake sees some blood-soaked kids as ghosts. Searching for clues in the 
drive-in across town, he comes across some scary children’s drawings of a severed arm (on paper that later turns blank) and later hears ghosts whispering “sever the limb”.
Following the conventions of the genre, there’s a spooky house, the aforementioned ghosts, a cranky sheriff who doesn’t want him digging up old painful memories, and an old man that tells him he should probably leave town and not to look 
around for revenge here.
Local girl Olivia (Lindsey Luscri) helps him getting old clippings and other info. She likes him, but he just ran out on another woman he knocked up back in the big city. Clifton’s laid-back and naturalist approach to the portrayal means we pretty much buy him. The girl not so much.
Jake thinks his big brother might be trying to communicate with him through the other ghosts, since he hasn’t seen his brother’s ghost yet. When they play back the tape recording of the squeaky old building, there’s a voice warning them to go back to Deadwood Park. The ghosts lead them to sites, leaving teeth for him to find and clues nearby. Led to an old abandoned church, they find a dirt cellar and ghostly instructions to dig.
The film is deceptive in its’ seeming simplicity and low-budget locations. The film’s a slow burn, but worth it, and actually fairly ambitious for a low-budget movie, with it’s multiple flashbacks; in fact, about a ¼ of film is flashbacks to the 80s or 40s or 50s. So essentially, part of it is a period piece (cue cars, clothes and hair of the time) and for a few minutes, at least, a war film, with guns and explosives, and all that that entails, as well.
The lighting worked for me. The music is pretty creepy and effective, too. The acting’s a little amateur, as the lead Clifton is not great, but not bad either, 
and his mostly blank expression works for his character, for the most part. The dense script is so good, and the project is just done so well overall, that’s it’s damn engaging to watch, and inspirational to micro-budget filmmakers. Exhibits a nice use of the whole frame. It’s very professional look adds a lot of value to this low-budget enterprise.
So. There you are in a basement, with an apparently unstoppable demonic creature. Remember, ghosts have whispered something about cutting off the limb, and you’ve seen disappearing sheafs of paper with drawings of severed arms. What would you do? What WOULD you do?
Yeah, me too.
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