You know, this movie brings SpOoKyWeEn to such a perfect close that I had better hope I have something this good for next year. Good thing I do! Don't Go in the Woods was, for a number of years, the closest thing I had to a favorite movie of all time. Not just my favorite horror movie...my favorite movie. Ev-er. Now, comments like that are decently common on the A-List. It is, after all, my List of A-class trash movies--the reason why I had to do things like a Godzilla Retrospective is that no one wants to hear about how I love every single movie I review. But it's movies like Don't Go in the Woods that caused me to start keeping an A-List to begin with. I have seen this movie more times than I can count. And so I think I'm going to have to close out Spookyween's look back at four decades of horror with a review that's a bit more frank and stream-of-consciousness than normal.
Don't Go in the Woods, at least for the first big chunk of it, is maybe best described as an anthology of vignettes. Essentially, a bunch of (mostly) nameless people Do Go in the Woods and are butchered by a large unwashed lunatic who carries a spear, wears rosaries on his head, and lives in a convincingly disgusting shack full of trophies/junk stolen from his victims. Along the way we follow a group of campers named Joanie, Peter, Ingrid, and Craig as they slowly begin to understand--too late--that there is someone out there hunting them. That's about as High Concept at it gets. And that's where director James Bryan succeeds. With a relatively (and deliberately) simple premise, he left himself room to fill in all the little nooks and crannies with pure oddity. Remarkably, both these oddities and the main plot (following the four young campers) are extremely satisfying. The movie succeeds in its event-content, and as I'll get into later, you'd better believe that this isn't the only type of content it does well.
I can't bring up the strangeness of this movie without describing it, and yet it permeates the movie so profusely that I can only scratch the surface--which is good, because then, as is my constant goal, you will be forced to watch the movie yourself.† When you take into account the reports that Bryan did make every ounce of weirdness on purpose, you recognize that this movie has a level of genius to it. Now, while I just said I want you to watch the movie, there is some stuff I have to spoil, so if you want the full experience, which I will absolutely recommend over my writing about it, Don't Finish This Paragraph. There are three scenes in particular that I refer to. The first is the one involving Dale and his...wife? Mother? Sister? In any case, Dale and his companion are two gaudily-dressed dweebs who stand out in a movie largely populated by gaudily-dressed dweebs. And if you've ever met me and my fashion sense in real life, you know what it means for me to describe someone or something as "gaudy." Dale just wants to take a photo of "the train" pulling in (there's no way a track runs through a forest this thick); she is more intent on annoying the fuck out of the audience in the most amusing way possible with her constant, contrast whining of "Daaale! Daaale! Wait for me, Dale!" Next, there are Cherry and Dick. They are a newlywed couple consummating their marriage. And their names are Cherry. And. Dick. May they and their mobile home RIP in Peace. And finally, there is the odd, odd sequence with Wheelchair Guy. I will say no more, even with a previous spoiler tag in place, but let me just say this: I don't think people in wheelchairs usually try to climb mountains unsupervised. Always, always, does this sequence get to me...
Can you start to see what I mean? I hope you can. I like to think this is a movie that can sell itself even in vagueness (even if I pump my admittedly-flawed bombast into things as usual), and I hope that becomes more apparent as I write on. In regards to that bombast, I really should be more quiet about this movie. It deserves a better analysis--not to say that any of the other movies I've reviewed didn't deserve me shrieking hysterically about them. I am sort of moving towards a thesis here--that's been planned--so I think trying to actually get academic might help in the long run...
With that being said: this movie is actually pretty scary. All the movies I've done for Spookyween are, in their own way, and that's why I picked them. Weasels Rip My Flesh has a hopeless grunginess to it; I Eat Your Skin has an atmospheric soundtrack and some eerie shots; and Daughter of Horror terrifies me from beginning to end. Don't Go in the Woods keeps its voice way, way down on its creeps, and encourages repeat viewings. For example, when we meet the four campers, they talk about rabies and what to do if you see an animal that could be rabid. Craig warns the group that it's not normal for forest animals to eagerly approach humans: "No animal in its right mind would dare bother us," he says. The scene cuts on that sentence, meaning we're supposed to pay attention to it. That leaves us with the impression that it's meant as foreshadowing: there is an "animal" who's gonna "bother" them, and no, he's not in his right mind. And in the scene where poor Dale the photographer is killed, his body is thrown down onto some rocks...next to a lake the four campers are playing in. At once, Hitchcockian suspense kicks in: we the audience know that there's a slaughtered corpse right next to our heroes, but they don't. Add this onto the fact that Bryan clearly knows how to use and place a camera. Murders are bookended with wide shots of the woods, which gives us a sense that nature is almost apathetic to what's happening here. And it shows how fucked the killer's victims truly are: when the cops finally get involved, they say that they've found around fifty bodies. The killer has been doing this for years, if not decades, and no one ever knew. Brrrr.
Of course, the movie is also laden with some more overt horror--yep, this is a Video Nasty, a member of that league of honored greats banned or sliced to ribbons in the UK by censors. And that means that the deaths are pretty gory. We never see any organs or entrails a la Lucio Fulci, but cinematography and blood packs come together in a way that makes it nicely visceral. Plus, it helps that there's usually something to make us care about the people being diced...
I do have to talk about the characters before I go into my conclusion. This movie manages to establish better characters in five minutes than five hours of DC movies did--and I know that's a cheap joke, but I mean to say more that there was a great script on this one, much more than "cheap" stereotypically allows. (Back to that in a second.) Peter is whiny, but ultimately courageous; Ingrid is snarky, but more reserved and chill than Joanie; Joanie is okay with smashing her friends' hands with rocks for fun (in a lovable way); and Craig is a nerd, obsessed with his own apparent knowledge of the woods but still being pretty dumb and useless. We also meet a Sheriff who is still somehow not the most corpulent police officer I've ever met, his pinball-playing deputy, and an attractive, compassionate nurse. Though none of them really get to say much, we get a feel for who they are, and they seem like real people. Maybe it's because their acting/dubbing is notably awkward. But it's well-acted awkward, a "we-knew-what-we-were-doing" awkward. I absolutely love it when movies do that, because somehow, in an age where "nerd movies" dominate the box office, we still can't fucking put nerds or awkward people in movies and have it be more sophisticated than goddamn Big Bang Theory. This movie--in its acting, direction, scripting, and editing--is a triumph for nerds. But cool nerds. Because James Bryan is one of the Cool Guys, or at least he can sell himself to me as such.
So I said earlier that I was building towards a thesis with this, and that's true. When I was preparing my review for this movie, I remembered something one of my professors told me in regards to the idea of a literary canon. She reminded us that a "classic" book has really never meant much more than the phrase we use almost as an idiom, "It's a classic!" It really does just mean a book that a large group of people happened to like very, very much, and begin to obsess over. We take the idea of "canon" in both literature and film pretty seriously, and I think most people take for granted the idea that something stereotypically great like Citizen Kane is going to be a good watch, and, perhaps consequently, that that which is unlike Citizen Kane is an inferior grade of film. And mainstream critical views have generally lauded praise on movies that, like Citizen Kane, have good budgets††--to the point, in fact, where I do think some receptions have colored their views based on how much the movie cost. And I say "receptions" here rather than opinions; I'm not going to be a dick and claim the right to critique what individual people think and say about movies I like or don't like. Opinions in crowds, however, form receptions, and we've seen that receptions can be engineered. The Golden Raspberries, for example, have the tendency to preemptively or flippantly pick movies to nominate for their Worst Movie categories, based on the fact that the members don't have to see the movies to nominate them. And while, yeah, the Razzies are basically just for fun and whatnot, and they clearly pick movies based on infamy, they are still well-known enough to leave a social impact, and critics have changed their minds in modern times about many of the movies that the Razzies helped condemn, like Heaven's Gate, Mommie Dearest, and hell, even Howard the Duck and Star Trek V. Of course, there's no objective way to determine if anyone was "wrong" or not--and the Razzies at least make sure to go after movies that actually made it to wide release, so there's there not an issue of budget here, but you'll see that critical culture has difficulty getting away from judging movies based on expense. Note that so many of them frequently call Ed Wood--mediocre at worst, next to some of the shit that's been made--the worst director ever because he and his movies were cheap. And so Don't Go in the Woods left me one general statement, which I want to apply both to the obscure "trash" I review here, as well as a lot of experimental or unusual "bad" movies of better budgetary standing, like At Long Last Love: we should be fairer to movies.
I condemn bashing movies that one hasn't seen, but more relevant to Don't Go in the Woods: I condemn bashing movies that had little money behind them, by that factor and by what ramifications it had on the film. By that, I guess I mean I want mainstream critical examination of movies that, by our current capitalist standards, fail. I want people to learn to appreciate the unique qualities of amateur acting, directing, scripting, and what those qualities mean--I want them to tease out detail and substance from things that we've already decided have none. And in doing so, I like to think that we'll learn something. I can't say I know what, but I'm starting to see inklings. And even if the best we can conjure for these movies is ironic, humorous appreciation...I'm sure we can glean something from that. I'm of the opinion that everything goes down forever, and there is nothing that is meaningless. We humans, I think, get a little snobby when it comes to deciding what things have what importance, and I know that's because we are short for this world. We only have so much time spent awake before we die. But let's be idealistic. Let's look into the past, review all the forgotten films that have come before, that no one watched or liked, and see what we can find.
Because while you watch this movie, I want you to remember that the classics we take for granted are just the ice above the water--the real heft is in the dark depths.
So that's Spookyween! Thanks for stopping by--grab some candy corn on the way out. It's the best I can offer as apology for the Sin of Didacticism, plus, I lied about there being a cash prize for the Costume Party. Next up will be a quartet of meetings for the Book Club of Desolation, because it's finally ~*~*BOOKVEMBER~*~*. So hang on tight, 'cuz y'ain't seen nuthin' yet!
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† Do not watch the bootlegs on YouTube. Those are, as far as I know, derived from the Video Nasty cuts, and most of the gore is removed, along with the soundtrack, for fuck knows what reason. I'm going to assume that that means music is too controversial for the average British censor.
†† Citizen Kane cost ~$840,000 in 1941, which is equivalent to roughly $14 million as of 2016. I do not consider this a small budget.
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