This is one of those films with a great idea, but less-than-ideal development.The problem is that the characters' motivations and interactions -- and the nature of the strange events -- are often unclear. These should unfold slowly, to build suspense, but they don't "unfold" at all. And too much attention is initially paid to one girl, rather than keeping the audience wondering. We only start to properly understand things near the end -- and the climax is a doozy.I couldn't help but think of Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt", which has a similar problem with development, but for the opposite reason. We know from the first scene exactly what's going on. There is absolutely no suspense. And the ending is hardly a surprise.Recommended, but be prepared to watch it a second time to see how the often confusing pieces fit together.

Extremely creepy, but somewhat unsatisfactory horror melodrama. The film has some marvelous special effects sequences, but the plot is not only confusing but far too way out to hold our full attention, despite excellent work by a hard-working cast led by Agnes Bruckner, Patricia Clarkson and Bruce Campbell.A lot of money was spent on the film too, but a large budget and good acting cannot go the full distance when the screenplay is both impossibly hazy and totally unbelievable.Admittedly, the movie starts well, but all the promise inherent in the early scenes is virtually lost when the screenplay decides to go all out on horror and elaborate special effects and never mind veresimilitude!.Available on an excellent UA DVD. (Take no notice of the exceptionally bad back cover, half of which is so messy, it is virtually impossible to read).

The front cover of The Woods reads 'And Bruce Campbell,' so I watched this. Bruce 'the chin' Campbell is a legend, providing one silly, tongue-in-cheek performance in horror films after another. However, it's worth noting he's barely in this and, when he is, he's not saying much.The Woods is about Heather - a young girl who gets sent to a private school by her (seemingly naturally) evil mother and silent father (Bruce Campbell incidentally). There, she gets picked on by a clichéd bully and starts to wonder if her teachers have ulterior motives for the pupils.The teachers mainly stand around in groups, facing the same direction and staring - always a sign that they're up to something. One occasionally twitches. This may be trying to add 'character' to them, but if you can watch without laughing you're a more composed person than me.The Woods is like a kind of remake of Italian horror classic 'Suspira,' as it's about a girl starting a new school run by witches. Soon, Heather's classmates start disappearing (luckily their parents don't seem to ever bother much that their children have vanished without a trace and nor to the police). The film's pretty slow, but deliberately so, doing its best to built tension and get to know the characters.There's nothing particularly wrong with The Woods, apart from the fact that it doesn't really offer anything new. If you've seen a reasonable amount of horror films, you've basically seen this. It's nicely directed, the sets are fitting and it picks up pace towards the end. I just felt it was too little too late.Give me Evil Dead any day.http://thewrongtreemoviereviews.blogspot.co.uk/

This movie is in 1965 and it moves along at that kind of pace. NOT a bad thing to my mind. Mommy doesn't daughter Heather for setting a fire and convinces daddy dear Joe, played by Bruce Campbell, to place her in a all girls school in, wait for it, the woods. As the show progresses two girls go missing when a fog enters the dorm. They are replaced by piles of dead leaves that are found in their beds. One girl who has been trying to help is found hung in the dining room. Before she is killed she has called daddy and he comes out with mommy dearest to take Heather back home. In case you haven't figured it out the teachers are all witches and cause the car to go of the road and coming up against a tree. Not a good thing in this film. Mommy gets killed, daddy and daughter go to a hospital where the head witch slits her palm and forces the blood (?) down Joe's throat thereby making a drone of him. Heather is dragged back to the school. Here she ends up taken to the crypt(?) where several of the missing girls are wrapped in tree limbs waiting to be taken over by the spirits trapped in the woods. Bruce throws up the witches brew, escapes the hospital, goes to the school where he finds an axe. He uses on a witch but gets tossed to the ground where the tree limbs start to wrap him up. Heather as used the distraction to break free and grabs the axe. Man does she wail away she chops 3-4 of the coven before slicing the root of the head witch. This apparently is all that is needed as all the teachers drop dead. It also frees daddy. The ending shows Heather burning pages from a test plus other things. The very last scene has Joe and Heather walking down the road with the rescued girls. Well done and not just some blood, guts, and gore for shock value unlike so many horror films today.