aka Don’t Go In the Woods Alone
- Directed by James Bryan
- Starring
- Jack McClelland
- Mary Gail Artz
- James Hayden
- Angie Brown
There are several possible signs that a movie stinks — crummy reviews, bad word of mouth, a low rating on the IMDb.
But the worst sign is when the previous renter only made it 28 minutes before returning it to the video store.
Smart man, whoever he was.
Our main “characters” are four backpackers, on a multi-day hike to reach some old family cabin that never enters the story. I say “characters” because these personalities would have to work a lot harder to qualify as cardboard. There’s one guy with a cowboy hat; he apparently knows a lot about woodcraft, as he bosses everyone else around. Since there can only be one Alpha Male, the other guy does goof-off rebellious stuff. The two girls can only be dinguished by their hair color; there’s the strawberry blonde with a goofy short haircut and no personality, and the brunette with a goofy short haircut and no personality. And not a soul among them can act. I mean, they can’t even act badly. It was a rare occasion when any of them could even get through a line without muffing it. Obviously, we’re dealing here with a director who believes strongly in the “Friends’n'Family, To Hell With Talent” philosophy of filmmaking.
(A side note about Cowboy Hat: Our introduction to him is his little lesson on the three rules of the woods, one of which is “Forget that Boy Scout nonsense about following rivers downstream”; the proper thing to do is seek out high elevation. Gee, if only those unfortunate Blair Witch documentarians had seen this movie…)
But these four are not alone in the woods; in fact, this parcel of pristine forest appears to be the Grand Central Station for cannon fodder characters. There are a throng of other hikers and campers (including one travelling alone in a wheelchair(!)), plus an ornithologist, a photographer, a whiny spouse, an ugly Just Married couple making out in a VW van (thanks, that’s just what this movie was missing), a fisherman, and a painter (who brought a toddler with her — yup, that’s a good way to get in touch with the peace and quiet of nature and focus on your art).
Oh yeah — there’s also a mysterious killer, so all of the above end up dead. Except the toddler. Dot dot dot.
We also get to meet the fat-ass sheriff and his dumb-ass deputy, who’ve been getting reports of missing hikers and make a half-hearted attempt to, you know, investigate or something.
We have now reached the 28-minute mark, and the only thing keeping me in my seat is the perverse desire to show myself a more hardened critic than the video’s last renter.
Eventually, non-Alpha Male wanders off in a huff and sees a fisherman get slaughtered, and finally we see the mysterious killer: a crazed, drooling mountainman, apparently a close relative to the anti-social clan from The Hills Have Eyes. Most of the rest of the movie involves the four backpackers getting separated from each other and trying to get back together as Drooly hunts them down. Up till now, Drooly has been a completely silent killer, which obviously works to his advantage; now, for some reason, he feels the need to announce his presence and presage his attacks with a pirate laugh: “Yaiah-heah-ha-hargh!”
And eventually each of the characters stumbles across Drooly’s cabin, which is filled with old sleeping bags, coolers, etc., from his victims. Plus, of course, a few fresh victims themselves.
Two of the backpackers finally make it to civilization and alert the sheriff, then come back out into the woods to find their friends. And naturally, though there are at least a score of posse members with guns combing the woods, it’s the two unarmed hikers who finally find Drooly and have to fight with sticks to defeat him.
Now, from what I’ve described, you may say, “Jeez, it sounds no worse than a lot of backwoods slasher flicks; what’s he bellyaching about?” And you would be forgiven; it’s very hard to convey in mere words how abysmally bad this movie is. Here are some pointers:
- Did I mention that not a soul can act? I shall forever be labelled a hypocrite if I ever complain about having to go to one of my kids’ school plays, because I’ve willingly sat through movies that can’t even aspire to the grade-school level of acting.
- The dialog is almost entirely looped, and poorly so; mouths don’t match words, emotion doesn’t match dialog, and the absolute inability of the performers to act is highlighted. One scene actually crosses the line into unintentional hilarity: The sheriff, in a plane looking for missing hikers, speaks loudly enough that his location dialog is kept, but the pilot’s lines are very obviously looped.
- The score was done on a Moog synthesizer by someone’s pet monkey — except for the poorly-spliced banjo bits, apparently supposed to be reminiscent of Dueling Banjos. (They weren’t.)
- The camera work was so inept, it was hard to distinguish the intentional Killer Cam hand-held shots from just plain poor shooting.
- Worst part: The possibly interesting plot point was completely ignored. Remember the toddler? At the end of the movie, after Drooly’s been disposed of, we see the toddler crawl of the cardboard box in which Drooly was keeping her; she idly plays with a hatchet. The implication is supposedly that she’ll grow up to be another murderous redneck, out here by herself.
Gee, wouldn’t that make an interesting story? The answer: YES! Far more so than watching Drooly cleanse the gene pool by removing the terminally stupid!
I woke up the morning after watching this with a splitting headache. I can only assume that my brain was in the middle of reassigning vital functions to compensate for the brain cells that expired during a very painful 88 minutes.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 15
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 0
- dream sequences: 1
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
- killer-cam shots: 9
- false scares: 4
- real scares: 0
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