The plot:Four young campers, Craig, Peter, Ingrid and Joanie, back-pack through the mountains for a relaxing weekend in the wilderness. They are out camping in broad daylight, while someone else is killing tourists in the woods. Craig warns the others not to go into the woods alone. The hillsides are crawling with fat women huffing up hillsides, nerdy bird-watchers, and young couples. Most of whom meet gruesome ends at the hands of a deranged and growling back-woodsman with a sharp spike - who announces his presence by shaking the nearest branch and whooping. The 'happy' campers don't see a man and his wife being chucked off a cliff whilst they splash about in the river below. They enter a forest which becomes denser and darker as they progress. Peter and Ingrid fear that they are lost. Something large suddenly comes lunging forward with a gleaming machete.Craig slips dead to the ground as the machete cuts him up. Peter and the others flee screaming into the forest. Definitely one of the worst movies ever made. No real plot, no acting and horrible directing...let me give you two examples:The very first scene a girl is running in a small stream away from someone we don't see even though we have a full on front view shot of her and what's behind her. Then she trips and there's blood all over her but again it's a full shot and no one else is there!!Later, there a guy sort of climbing a rock and he some how is choked by something around his neck we can't see. Cut to long shot and he fall off the rocks into a water fall...but wait! Cut to another close up and he is still holding on to the rock choking even tho we just saw him flying through the air!!!!My god this film is terrible. And it's not Good-Bad. It just sucks
... View More***SPOILERS*** Hiking through the woods of the great Pacific Northwest a group of campers run into this deranged maniac who feels that their encroaching on his territory. Unlike the more of less harmless and , despite his overly hairy appearance,likable Big Foot this guy really means business who not only takes out most of the campers but a number of unrelated persons including a bird watcher and wheelchair bound nature boy along with them. The manic looking like an extra from the movie one million years B.C does his dirty and bloody work with what looks like a both saber and fur covered club dispatching as well as decapitating, the crippled & wheelchair nature boy, more then a dozen victims.With the manic getting out of control it's now up to the local sheriff, who looks like a king size version of Michael Moore, to rustle up a posse to stop the carnage from spreading beyond the tree-line and into the nearby population centers. Meanwhile back in the dark woods two of the surviving campers Peter & Ingrid are left to face the killer alone at his cabin in the woods where he keeps his victims body parts in storage to cook and eat later. With the sheriff and his posse nowhere in sight it's up to Peter and Ingrid to take the manic on single handed in his home turf or territory that lead to the incredible blood soaked final.For a movie with non actors and a bottom basement budget "Don't go in the Woods" really accomplishes, in scaring its audience, what it set out to do. In fact one of the scariest scenes in the film had nothing at all to do with the campers, whom the manic was out to murder, but a couple in a trailer Dick & Cherry. Whom he not only sliced up but in Cherry's case set the trailer in fire and rolled in down an embankment with her, after being sliced to pieces, in it and still alive and screaming hysterically!P.S Check popular Texas DJ Ken Cater as the more then 350 pound sheriff who despite his size and being in no shape to be hiking or slumbering through the woods is, in him sticking out like a sour thumb, totally overlooked by the manic who had no trouble at all taking out a number of far lighter and faster victims who unlike Carter were no real threat to him!
... View MoreObviously inspired by slasher classics like Friday the 13th, this low-budget slasher flick has a murderous mountain man hunting down a bevy of hikers and campers in the Utah woods and mountains. No scares per se, but some pretty decent killings including one comic relief beheading of a man in a wheelchair (reminiscent of the wheelchair guy in Texas Chainsaw Massacre). The mountain man does not appear on camera until the second half, which is a good thing as he does not exactly inspire much fear. Good POV shots as he stumbles through the woods and decent camera work throughout keep the thing afloat. I do believe this has put more than one young person off of camping, much the way Jaws gave my sister in law the creeps every time she got into the shower. Mostly amateur actors and a lousy music score cost it one point in my book.
... View MoreIrresistible hunk of wilderness slasher trash regarding a grotesquely filthy homicidal mountain man who viciously attacks any camping tourist who enters his neck of the woods. I guess he might be a cannibal as well since he stores the bodies of the fallen in bags, placed inside his makeshift house, where a private collection of his victims are also present. While most victims are merely presented as lambs to the slaughter(..and artist, an ornithologist, wheel-chair cripple), the film does follow four backpackers, Peter(Jack McClelland), Ingrid(Mary Gail Artz), Craig(James Hayden)and Joanie(Angie Brown)who spend a great deal of time either arguing or pulling pranks on each other. They will eventually fall prey to the maniac who thoroughly enjoys hunting down his quarry and hacking away at them with a home-made spear(..a long stick with a blade on the end which sheds a hell of a lot of blood). While Joanie watches from her sleeping bag, hung from a tree(..by boyfriend Craig, whose the type of know-it-all who enjoys the authoritative sound of his own voice as he informs the others of the ways of living in the wilderness), Craig is sliced and diced while Peter, who has seen the killer and made a great escape, hunts for Ingrid. Joanie, separated from her friends, must find shelter while Peter and Ingrid attempt to find any sign of civilization, each trying to avoid being hacked to pieces by the demented psycho.Bottom line, this film is about a maniac savagely attacking innocent folks who are minding their own business. The film must be set during tourist season because the killer has quite a list of victims to dispatch. The camera-work is mostly following the actions of the characters as they move throughout the woods..I guess this would explain why the film is so heavily dubbed. Layered like a lot of low-budget slashers with a synth score, the director often shoots the picturesque landscape of Utah, I'm guessing, to establish that the killer has plenty of territory to hide and roam as those from the city infiltrate his home opening up themselves to certain terror. The dialogue and dubbing is indeed cringe-worthy, no doubt, and there's some really mind-bogglingly stupid behavior exhibited by certain survivors who escape only to re-enter the woods. The director obviously had a limited budget to work with and the knife and machete stabbings are heavily edited with lots of blood splattering to and fro, cutting away from showing the weapons actually penetrating the bodies of those attacked. I found some of the killings rather effective because, despite not displaying how the blade truly slices flesh, the murders are so savage and unrelentingly sadistic that the menace behind the attacks left an impression. The film doesn't pretend to be anything other than a slasher where victims are brutally slain by a nutcase. The Utah setting probably enhances this film despite it's unoriginal plot and rather mundane characters/performances. I won't lie, though, when I say that I had fun with this one. The ending, reflecting an infant the sicko kidnapped, is a hoot. The most creative kill would have to be how the killer brutally stabs a couple who were together in a sleeping bag, thrown over a tree and stabbed repeatedly(..the director even shows their reactions inside the bag!).
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