Director: Alex T. Hwang
Year: 2022
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: Ravening Woods
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
After exposing a senatorial conspiracy, a reporter finds herself abducted by a crazed daughter of the senator looking for revenge by undertaking a hunting session in the woods, but when they find the woods patrolled by a vicious creature from folklore are forced to work together to get out alive.
Review:
Overall, this was a pretty underwhelming genre effort. Where this one works is the work done here to build up the creature attacks as shocking and quite thrilling. With the use of sudden shock appearances crawling out of the woods to charge and swarm his victim which has a great starting point. That becomes even more apparent in the second half where it begins to utilize the mimicry tactic to lure them out into the woods where it can attack them in more favorable environments leading to some chilling scenes of victims being lured to their eventual confrontation with the creature through this notion of thinking that a friend is calling for them. Elsewhere, the series of chases and escapes that make up the race to get out of the area have a thrilling energy to it and feature some of the only real genre action in the film which is quite fun on its own.
There are some rather big issues present with this one. One of the main drawbacks here is the highly uninvolved and generally unappealing that leaves a lot to be desired with this one. That both of the women at the center of the film are highly unappealing and unlikable to be around, from the reporters’ open disdain for doing anything other than breaking the news of someone’s downfall or the captor's who plan to seek revenge on her disgraced senator father by kidnapping and forcing the woman who did that into a life-or-death chase through the woods. The whole point to this is so ridiculous and nonsensical that it’s hard to take it seriously much less care about two people as scummy and unlikeable as they are. The heavily dialog-based outcome of their situation doesn’t do this that many favors and causes this to be rather unappealing.
Moreover, the film manages to be undone by a rather dull and dragged-out pace which isn’t that investing. By thinking that these people are interesting and worth the time time to be around, we get agonizingly long stretches of film dominated by these two going back-and-forth in aggravating arguments while trekking through the woods to reveal the captors’ masterplan or awkward attempts at asserting control which is all laughable and groan-inducing as it forces the film to eventually partake in the cliche setup of rivals being forced to worked together to get out of a dangerous situation together. As well as unnecessary interjections by a reporter relaying useless information about the incident, these all manage to keep the creature until the later portion of the film which doesn’t really have that much excitement. As that ends up lowering the blood and gore due to not having a lot of screentime with the creature running loose, these end up lowering the film.
Overview: **/5
Somewhat of a disappointment with a few big issues, this one really could've been much better which ends up leaving this one somewhat of a generally dull effort overall. It's worth a watch for those that appreciate this kind of low-budget indie feature while most others out there that are turned off by the flaws should heed caution.
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