Director: Corin Hardy
Year: 2015
Country: UK/USA/Ireland
Alternate Titles: The Good People; The Woods
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
Arriving at a remote Irish villa, a couple and their infant son who are looking to mark a local area of the forest for a logging experiment find their neighbors' tale about a group of creatures called The Hallow are true when they target their infant son and must race to save him from the beings.
This one wasn’t all that bad of an effort. One of the strongest elements of this one is the fact that it manages to readily offer up some rather impressive atmosphere of the Irish setting this is taking place in. The lush, bright green forest, moss-covered rocks and trees and impenetrable layout all manage to provide the locations here with a stellar overall look that's impressively chilling, especially with the area's ability to dampen and hide caves and other outcrops for the beings to hide in unseen.
That gives this an altogether quite chilling concept here with the creepy creatures hiding in a creepy location which this one exploits quite well.
Once the film goes into the idea of the creatures attacking the house, it generates some rather fun moments here. The first incidents that are shown to trigger something happening with the creatures, from the appearance in the baby's room to the initial signs that the dog is distressed give this a decent start to the proceedings later on where they try to escape the house. Filled with some solid scenes of them driving through a field of creatures trying to get away to the barricade inside the abandoned house trying to prevent them from getting to their infant which results in one of the finest scenes in the film of them trying to retrieve it once he gets captured. The finale, with the descent into the creatures' lair and showing the way they react to him as he slowly becomes one of them while trying to protect his child has some great ideas at play here which really gives this a lot to like overall. As well, the creatures look great once we get to see them and helps to hold this one up overall.
There are some problems with this one. Among the film's biggest transgressions is the absolutely banal and long-winded setup this goes through in the first half that just takes forever to get going. There's not much of anything going on with the endless scenes of the family puttering around the house as they argue about the absolutely trivial matters of their lives which manages to really slow down the interest of this one considerably during this part of the story where it's important to get this going and this banality that occurs at the beginning is quite hard to get through, especially with the usually long-winded British-style pacing here that renders much of these scenes with such little intensity and drive that even the attempts at horror fall flat from the boredom this induces.
The other real problem here is in it's confused and nonsensical storyline that doesn't really make much sense. The fact that once again people are given cryptic messages about what's going on within the film in regards to what the creatures are and then expect everyone to heed their warnings just because is an irritating ploy as they rightfully ignore such baseless meanderings. There's very little of any kind of information about the creatures, how they live or what they're society is like beyond simply wanting the baby of theirs like all the others who have supposedly come before them, much less what the process of what he undergoes once he transforms into the creature as they don't mention what happens to him at all to undergo that change, so in total the creatures are just plain mysterious. Coupled with some shoddy CGI in places and these hold the film back somewhat.
While it does have some minor issues at play here, overall this one still maintains enough positive points to be quite enjoyable when it wants to be. Give this a shot if you're into these kinds of creature features or have some curiosity about the film, while those that aren't swayed all that much about it should heed caution here.
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