SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

arfdawg-1 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

captaincracker There isn't that much to say about "Don't Go in the Woods". It is basically the most uninspired slasher film I've seen, and that's saying something from a guy who has seen every sequel, prequel, remake, and knock-off, and who in particular loves early 80's slasher gold. This is fool's gold. So what makes this movie worse than flicks like "Madman", "The Burning", "Prom Night", "The Prowler", and "Graduation Day"?For starters, "Don't Go in the Woods" has absolutely no originality to it. The movie is basically a complete knock-off of the previous year's "Just Before Dawn", only "Woods" has more characters and deaths but lacks the atmosphere, suspense, and twist of "Dawn". This film is absolutely amateur in its making. It has a great atmosphere to use and doesn't use it. It doesn't allow any room for character development. Rather than creating suspense it jumps right to the kill. There is simply no use of artistic film-making or creativity in this entire flick.Earlier in the week I finally was able to see another infamous B-movie slasher, "Graduation Day", which I thought was missing something. Compared to "Woods", "Graduation Day" looks like a masterpiece. "Graduation Day", along with "Friday the 13th", "The Burning", "Madman", "The Prowler", "Happy Birthday to Me", "Prom Night", "Halloween", "A Nightmare on Elm Street", "House on Sorority Row", "Just Before Dawn", "My Bloody Valentine", and others may follow a simple formula but it knows how to make that formula entertaining. Those movies have a rhythm. "Don't Go in the Woods" has no rhythm, but seems more like a bunch of footage of random, annoying people we don't care about or like getting killed in uneventful ways.Watching this movie felt like it was taking hours, even though it was only 85 minutes. So why would I continue watching "Don't Go in the Woods"? It is a movie from a time period that will never return. Movies like "Woods" will never be released again. This is a grindhouse picture - a low-budget, cheesy movie that played in limited cinemas and never went mainstream. It has earned a large cult fanbase over the past thirty years, and the title has become infamously famous for being a bad movie. For a horror fan, "Woods" is a sort of time capsule, a look back in time to when anyone could make a slasher movie as long as you had a camera. This time has come and gone, and has been forgotten about. For over twenty years, no one thought about "Woods", but the internet and DVD sales have helped bring it back.The cult horror film "Don't Go in the Woods" is only a popular movie because it is so bad and at one point so unpopular. As a slasher film fan, I am glad to have seen it. The acting is atrocious, the writing is wretched, the effects and laughable, and the plot is absent. But with a few cool shots of the scenery, "Don't Go in the Woods" somehow can keep the audience's minds off its lack of substance. And does this movie really need any substance? That's a debatable question.Definitely only a movie for hardcore slasher fans. Regular genre fans will most probably get bored and turn it off, and if you don't like horror movies or bad b-movies than steer clear and don't enter "the Woods".

Scarecrow-88 Irresistible 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!).

lovecraft231 A pair of young campers decide to have a nice weekend with nature. Too bad for them (and others) that a deranged killer lives in the woods, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out what he wants to do. Will any of them make it out alive. Will the local police save the day? Will you find a reason to care? Done during the slasher craze of the 80's, "Don't Go in the Woods" is bad in many ways. There are poorly done attempts at humor, the gore is about as convincing as paper machete, the narrative is as confusing as it gets, we get constant useless shots of the natural world, and the dialog is dubbed in-and terrible.At least the weird electronic score by H. Kingsley Thurher is fun in a slasher movie electronic score way, and a few of the clichés (like the guy warning the kids) are dumb fun. As it stands though, "Don't Go in the Woods", while not the worst backwoods/kids going camping slasher, is still bad on all accounts.