October 2013 Edition #4: DON'T GO IN THE WOODS

Director: James Bryan
Screenplay: Garth Eliassen
Starring: Jack McClelland, Mary Gail Artz, James P. Hayden, Angie Brown, Tom Drury
Release Date: September 1981


You’re kidding, right? This isn’t really a movie! Ha! Actual movies don’t look or sound or defy rational explanation like this thing does. Good one, Code Red DVD! You actually had me there for a second, believing DON’T GO IN THE WOODS was an actual motion picture created by human adults who believed what they were crafting was actually of fair enough quality to be released for public consumption. How silly! I mean, director James Bryan and co. would have to be some colossally irresponsible and misguided dipshits to seriously expect patrons to willingly fork over their money to witness something that they could barely be bothered to write, perform, light, properly score or record sound for. I’d feel like some kind of asshole if I paid good money to watch a movie like that, and deservedly so.

What’s that? It…it’s real? You mean this…sigh….this movie is actually a….a thing?


Ah, shit!




Fuck me, man!




Goddamnit.



I guess I should probably review this fucker then, huh?

I don't like it any more than you do, honey, but you've gotta face the facts: this movie happened.

DON’T GO IN THE WOODS opens with some incredibly shaky helicopter photography of a mountainous Utah landscape. It’s as if the director wanted to immediately make it clear that his film is neither THE SHINING, nor does he possess the directorial talent of a dead skin cell on Stanley Kubrick’s taint. The film then cuts to a young woman running from an unseen assailant through a forest before falling down and bleeding for no reason. Smash cut to four powerfully unattractive young campers, Peter (McClelland), Ingrid (Artz), Craig (Hayden), and Joanne (Brown) trekking across the wilderness with Craig in the lead. Right out of the gates I have some major fucking problems, not least of which is the fact that every single line of dialogue in this flick was very audibly dubbed  (poorly) in post, rendering performances that already averaged out in the piss-poor range absolutely scorn-worthy. And speaking of scorn, I loathed the fuck out of Craig, an over-confident “survival expert” who resembles a freakishly large Peter Dinklage crossbred with a ferret and forced to wear a safari hat. This eminently punch-worthy twat of a person was the cause of numerous epileptic fits of rage every time his hellish face reared up on screen issuing survival tips that are idiotic at best, and inserting awkward pauses into every line of dialogue. Lines like “Did I hear everyone say they wanted to….camp here?” and “Wait! Do you smell something?” sum up the extent of this characters’ usefulness. The two women are at least only awful in their blandness, if not their line readings. Peter, however, is my favorite character in the film, thanks to a sublimely awkward performance from Jack McClelland who spends most of the time wavering between idiotic laughter and melodramatic tears. I still haven’t decided whether I think Peter is retarded or bipolar. Either way his performance, enhanced by some truly stupendous facial expressions, is the single funniest thing in the movie.

DIE, DIE, DIE!!!!!

When we aren’t being treated to interminable footage of our leads traversing the terrain while somber synth music drones on the soundtrack, the film frequently cuts to random scenes of other campers in the area getting killed. I wish there was more I could say, but that’s it. These characters are never introduced and there is no buildup. We merely see a new person, and then immediately see that person dying. Director James Bryan and his editor are so focused on delivering the punch line of the murders that sometimes we don’t even get that much. On several occasions the film will cut from a dialogue scene straight to the ending of a totally unrelated murder, then back to the dialogue. Even worse than that is the inclusion of sound effects of people screaming and dying as they walk off screen, obviously added months after the fact in a desperate attempt to amp up the body count. Not that the movie really needed any more kills, as scores of nameless people are massacred over the course of it’s running time. Unlike THE FOREST, the inane horror-in-the-woods opus I reviewed last year, DON’T GO IN THE WOODS at least has the goddamn decency to spill a considerable amount of plasma. Like when some old guy who looks like a woman, except that woman looks like Meatloaf wearing a blue muumuu, gets his/her skull smashed on a rock before being tossed off of a cliff and slamming onto the rocks below, where two young lovers are inexplicably oblivious and continue splashing in the spring. A birdwatcher gets bashed in the head with a rock and has his very obvious rubber arm sliced off. An artist barely paying attention to her child, poorly tethered to a bouncer hundreds of feet away, is stabbed in the back multiple times, each thrust of the knife skewering her to the painting she was working on.  Two repugnant middle-aged newlyweds, Dick and Cherry (No, I’m not making this shit up!), have their honeymoon cut short when the madman hacks Dick to pieces and pushes the van containing Cherry  down into a ravine, causing the van to spontaneously combust.

His name was Robert Paulsen.

The whole movie is made up of these brief vignettes, all of them inexplicable and some of them barely even visible. One slaughter in particular takes place at night and involves a couple being wrapped up in their tent….I think. Maybe it was their sleeping bag? Now that I think about it, I couldn’t tell if it was the same bag, or individual bags. But the killer definitely strung them up over a tree branch and stabbed them to death….I think. Maybe they were abducted by aliens. I don’t know. I couldn’t see shit, it was so poorly lit. To add to the confusion, there is a musical cue used in this scene that I suppose was meant to evoke the shower scene from PSYCHO, except instead of Bernard Hermann’s strings it sounds like a combination of a motor stalling and a nasty fart on a leather couch. At first I thought the killer was starting up a chainsaw, which would have immediately made the movie better, but once I finally figured out it was supposed to be music and I was thus meant to be “terrified“, I just got angry.

"I just turned this many years old!"

Which leads me to another major fucking problem: the music. Or should I say, the three 30-second cues that get rotated over and over for an hour and a half. There’s the aforementioned “Fart-Motor” cue; a suspense cue that’s just a mixture of “Fart-Motor”, bongos and a really obnoxious rattle; and then a serenely eerie, somber medley that is actually quite effective, except for the fact that it gets repeated eleventy goddamn times in the final act and oh my god it’s been two days and I CAN STILL HEAR IT RIGHT NOW, WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!

Eventually the killer is revealed in a scene that is a cacophony of poor editing choices, as Peter sits in the entrance of a cave staring moronically into space, and the film randomly cuts to split-second images of him playing in the water with his female companions. I guess this is supposed to represent his memories of good times past, but the way the film cuts frenetically back and forth, paired with a disturbing shot of a shirtless Peter cackling madly on a rock, makes it look like he’s experiencing a nervous breakdown. In one of the only shots in this thing that is even remotely effective, a middle-aged backpacker strolls up and, as Peter awkwardly waves at him, the camera pulls back to reveal a filthy fur-clad figure towering on the rocks above him. The moment almost works perfectly, but then the backpacker’s face makes direct contact with a bear trap. He screams, Peter screams, and the killer screams so hard that he coughs a loogie up in his beard, which caused me to dry heave. Such majestic stupidity could not have been coordinated intentionally, though I’m sure James Bryan would argue otherwise.

It's like Peter Bark mated with Richard Simmons.

Finally the maniacal mountain man catches up with the rest of the camp. Craig, the big dumbass, decides it would be funny to zip his girlfriend up in her sleeping bag and hang her from a tree, while yelling at her and calling her a “Faggot bitch!”. Well, that, or “Bagged-up bitch!”, though neither really makes a whole lick of sense. As Joann hangs upside down, the homicidal hillbilly becomes my nominee for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year when he kills the ever-loving fuck out of Craig. Joanne manages to escape and Peter catches up with Ingrid back at the camp in time to set up a final lengthy foot chase to round out the conclusion of this disaster. Now, as confounding as the film had been up to this point, I figured hey, this movie was obviously filmed by a bunch of muppets with no concept of how human beings interact, but on the whole the experience was rather fun in a charmingly incompetent kind of way.

And then I looked at the time and realized this movie still had forty minutes left.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCK!!!!!!!

DON’T GO IN THE WOODS proceeds to fly magnificently off the rails at this point, leading up to the most incompetently mounted manhunt I’ve ever seen. Peter and Ingrid make it back into town, and only then do they remember that they’ve left Joanne behind, but the local sheriff and his deputy are two of the most disinterested lawmen in screen history, opting to wait until morning to even attempt a search. So Peter inexplicably goes mad and flees into the forest to defeat the madman on his own, and all of this is intercut with some hilarious footage of a fat guy in a wheelchair trying unsuccessfully to roll his way up a hill while “hilarious” music plays on the soundtrack, because cripples are fucking funny, right? The movie just keeps piling on the stupidity in these final moments, with the police hauling Ingrid right back out into the heart of darkness for no reason, and then of course there’s the killer’s secret lair, the worst-kept secret in hidden lair history due to the fact that EVERYBODY finds the place at one point or another.

At least they managed to work the poster art in somewhere.

I won’t lie, guys, I seriously started to space out at this point. Nothing makes sense, the same musical cue repeats every thirty or so seconds, and the fat sheriff stumbles around saying inane things like “The National Guard ain’t helping is, cuz they say it’s county business!” Goddamnit, there must be, at minimum, thirty or forty dead motherfuckers littering these mountains, and the National Guard just says “Fuckit!”? WHAT. THE. FUCK?!?! Fortunately, the film manages to redeem itself in the finale, when Peter and Ingrid get the upper hand on the murderous hillbilly and stab him over and over again with a machete and a pointed stick for what feels like minutes on end, all while he shrieks in ungodly agony. In a first for any slasher movie that I‘ve seen, these two manage to do the job right the first time and murder the villain TO DEATH. It is fucking amazing!

"And this is for taking so long to murder Craig!"

 This level of ridiculousness along with many shortcomings combine to create a sublimely humorous and surreal experience. DON’T GO IN THE WOODS sucks many varieties of dicks, but it’s an endearing sort of cock-suckery. I genuinely feel bad for everyone involved in this production, as they seemed to at least be trying to make something entertaining, unlike the folks who made THE FOREST, who could barely be bothered to give a damn. As alarming and unreal as every frame of this flick is, I won’t deny feeling a certain masochistic joy watching the idiocy unfold. I will not, however, give the director or his screenwriter credit for this, as any enjoyment one gets from this film is entirely by accident. As bad as it is, I feel oddly compelled to share this film with friends, if not for a few good laughs, then at least to show them the true bottom of the filmmaking barrel.

My Rating:
3.5/10