Killers in the Woods (2005)

Posted on Jun 28, 2006 under "Cold", Horror |

No credited writer or director
Starring
- Phil Heath
- Anne Curtis
- El Diablo
- Katiya Petkovich
- Lisa Nelson
Produced (and edited) by Nick Yale

So Sariah, my five-year-old, decided to put on a puppet show. She got behind the couch with eight-year-old Jason and two-year-old Emma and a collection of puppets and stuffed animals out of the toybox. There was a quick discussion as she outlined her plot idea to Jason, and then up came the puppets. There was a crazy-eyed cow whose mother, a pig (Piglet, in fact), told her every day to be nice to people she met. Then she’d go out, meet some other puppet or animal, and eat it. She’d go home and her mother would gently scold her. And from time to time Jason would stick up a rubber carnotaur puppet from a Dinosaur Happy Meal and announce, “She’s getting fat!” And Sariah would stand up and say, “That’s not part of the story.” And there was much giggling both behind the couch and in front of it, where Michele and I were sitting.

I tell that story here for two reasons:

1) The production values and storytelling skill displayed from behind our couch dwarfed those present in Killers in the Woods.

2) I would rather be telling you about almost anything other than how badly Killers in the Woods sucked. There is a permanent warp in the fabric of spacetime centered on my DVD player, thanks to the naked singularity of suckage contained on this one innocuous-looking DVD-R.

It could be worse, though. Instead of telling you about it, I could be watching it again. I put myself to sleep last night counting all of the things I’d rather do than watch Killers in the Woods a second time. The list included “watching an octagenarian nun stripper” and “eating a raw kitten.” And while I entertain the notion that watching an octagenarian nun stripper while eating a raw kitten might conceivably be worse than Killers in the Woods, the point is far from proven.

“Hi. My name’s Guido, and I’ll be your extremely visible camera operator today…”

You may think I’m being mean. You’re wrong. Frankly, I don’t know if I could be mean to this movie. I’m not at all confident that words could be strung together in any way which might present this movie as being worse than it is. Even referring to it by convention as a “movie” is an undeserved compliment; at best, what occurs between the fragmentary opening and closing credits qualifies as “footage.” At worst, it’s such a violation of all social and artistic standards that no amount of money could bribe even Kofi Annan to look the other way.

And I can lambaste and denigrate this “feature” with a clear conscience. Because when Nick Yale, the producer (and director, I can only surmise from the vague credits) contacted me repeatedly and offered me a screener, I took a look at the website, where the main appeal of the movie was proudly shown to be “Killers! In the woods! There’s women! And they get killed! In the woods! Buy it today!” I told him, You don’t want to send this to me. Everything I see about this movie leads me to believe I will hate it passionately. Please don’t make me prove it. But he insisted, whether out of the stunning delusion that there’s an iota of entertainment to be had on the once-pristine DVD-R he ruined to send to me, or perhaps because he hates me. Yes, I have to believe that’s it. Somehow, somewhere, without meaning to, I have done something which engendered the fury and loathing of Nick Yale, and the most fitting form of revenge he could design was to put together this horrendous misuse of the very concept of cinema, laying his every last shred of self-respect (as well as that of everyone he knew, all dozen or so of them) on the altar of his hatred.

Eventually I’ll have to stop dealing with ancillary matters and describe the movie to some degree, won’t I? Very well. Although there’s really damnably little to tell. I’ve complained before about movies being light on plot, but this one is absolutely plot-free. It’s more like a single scene or scenario playing out repeatedly, with minor variations.

This is the way we wipe the jam,
wipe the jam, wipe the jam…

To wit: Our, um, protagonist (I’m guessing Phil Heath) accosts a woman. It could be in her back yard, or on her doorstep, but most likely it’s (duh) in the woods. He incapacitates her by strangling her or beating her. There’s a long, lingering shot as she lies unconscious. Then he kills her. Another long, lingering shot, perhaps with some slight convulsions. Repeat ad nauseum.

You may think I’m glossing over the plot, but really, that’s all there is. In between these scenes, we’ve got snippets of footage of our killer sitting on a couch, talking directly into the camera. No, there’s no character development or larger context here; he just adlibs stuff about how much be enjoys killing women. He looks like a balding Lou Costello. Perhaps for some viewers that makes the character seem more disturbing, an average joe like people living on your own block who might harbor dark fantasies of mass murder. However, with characterization being at such a low ebb, I can’t separate the character from the eager performer, and thus I can only see him… as sad. Sad, pitiful, small-souled, believing that poorly-shot scenes of women being unimaginatively killed are worth the time he spent making it, or the time I spent watching it.

And they are poorly-shot scenes, too; I’m not just decrying the lack of anything resembling a narrative. It’s a consumer-grade digital camcorder, pointed vaguely in the direction of the ad-libbed action, and edited using every preset transition effect in the desktop editing suite. I would be embarrassed if the high school special needs class couldn’t produce something more professional with the resources at hand.

Please! Don’t make me watch any more!

If I were a drinking man, I could at least have found solace in a simple drinking game: Every time our starring killer knocks or strangles or drugs a woman unconscious, then immediately starts nudging her and patting her cheeks and telling her to wake up, take a drink. I could have been besotted and oblivious by the hour mark. But no, I experienced the whole thing stone-cold sober.

The music? Ooh, I get to play good news/bad news here. The good news is that the music is better than the single-note Casio soundtracks that some micro-budget features make do with. The bad news (and, dependably, the bad far outweighs the good) is that the musical selections seem to have been chosen at random, without any regard to mood or atmosphere or tempo. We’re as likely as not to see a killing set to a tune more appropriate for recounting the community calendar on the lunchtime news broadcast. Once or twice, I almost suspected that there was some kind of wit at work here, as the music was too ridiculous to be anything more than a joke, but then I reconsidered; every other aspect of the whole was done without any apparent awareness of just how crappy it was, so in context, there’s no reason to even entertain the possibility of wit at work.

And literally, that’s the whole movie. Woman after woman (with the same actresses being used up to three or four times) expiring at length at the hands of Phil Heath, or in a rare occurrence, an associate who’s got just as much screen charisma. There’s a bizarre interlude in the middle which looks like it was shot fifteen years ago (using then-current video technology); it differs from the rest rather drastically in that it centers on what seems to be a crazy ‘Nam vet, and is set in a city instead of the woods. But guess what? It’s women getting killed. I’m guessing that it was scavenged footage from an earlier, never-completed project. Because what this film really needed was more padding to keep those closing credits from getting any closer.

Only a small sampling of the utter assness that is Killers in the Woods.

It’s possible at this point that some of you are shaking your heads and saying, “Nathan, you just don’t get it. This is a fetish flick. It’s not about story or plot or character, it’s about disturbed dickwads getting off on the violent fantasies that make up for their personal and phallic shortcomings.” And yes, I do recognize that this falls into the category of a fetish video. But here’s the thing: Even by the standards that would appeal to those developmentally-challenged bottom feeders, it still doesn’t succeed. The violence is laughably staged; I’ve seen more believable death scenes in elementary school plays. Any sick perv hoping to get his rocks off watching Sweet Young Things meet their demise here would come away with a sinking feeling in his stomach, wondering, “Whoa — am I really such a sorry excuse for a human being?” There isn’t a single possible audience segment which could appreciate this flick, with the possible exception of drooling cretins who consistently lose tic-tac-toe games to paramecia.

In case I’ve left you wondering, “How does Killers in the Woods compare to other movies Nathan’s hated?” let me state in no uncertain terms: To my knowledge, this is the worst piece of banal flotsam masquerading as a motion picture which has ever been inflicted by one putative human being upon his fellow man. Compared to this, the most self-indulgent excesses of French cinema like I Stand Alone (1998) are the pinnacle of the art and craft. Unnaturally Born Killer (1996) comes off like Citizen freaking Kane. My imagination recoils from even considering the possibility that a worse misuse of the medium of cinema could exist.

WANTED
FOR CRIMES AGAINST MY EYEBALLS

Which is why the fact that there is a Killers in the Woods 2 now available fills me with a soul-devouring, nigh-Lovecraftian horror. Such things simply Should. Not. Be.