“Something smells,” we hear no more than five minutes into Don’t Go in the Woods. “What’s that stink?” The piece-of-shit indie slasher is the answer to its own question.
Roughly 25 minutes later, we hear, “I wonder if something’s happened.” I’ll handle this one, movie: “Barely a thing.”
An obvious ploy by talent-challenged director James Bryan (The Executioner Part II) to trick Friday the 13th fans, Woods throws a bunch of asshole campers (or camping assholes, if you prefer) into the Utah wilderness. Among them are our eventual heroes, Ingrid (Mary Gail Artz) and Peter (Jack McClelland); since they both look like men, it is possible to tell them apart because Peter is wearing a pink T-shirt advertising Boogie Vision, a Bryan project that is somehow way worse than this one. (Aside: Boogie Vision is supposed to be funny, yet isn’t, whereas Woods is not supposed to be funny, yet is.)
It hardly matters who’s who, except for the antisocial antagonist who will be narrowing that list to as close to zero as he can get. Per the credits, that freak of nature is Maniac (Tom Drury), a mute mountain man who lives in a booby-trapped hoarder cabin and looks like awards-show banter writer Bruce Vilanch doing Mad Max cosplay after stopping by the crafts fair for beads. He grunts softly and carries a big stick with a pointy blade and a coonskin cap on its stabbing end. No one is safe — not the photographer in the pink beret, not the ’bout-to-boink newlyweds in the VW Bus with the Farrah Fawcett-Majors poster in its ceiling, and especially not the wheelchair-bound guy out for a … what, a rolling jaunt through the mountains and all its rough and uneven terrain?
Amateur actors utter their lines with blundering pauses … as if … they’re reading … from … cue cards. Doing that is well within the realm of possibility, since Bryan shot almost all of Don’t Go in the Woods in that fright-killer you and I and every moviegoer we know call broad friggin’ daylight. —Rod Lott