Director: Devon Commons
Year: 2024
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Heading out for a trip together, a group of friends decides to head out to the local woods to spend time together telling stories as an inspiration piece for an upcoming book one of them is going to write, but when they stumble upon an inhuman killer knocking them off must get out of the woods alive.
Review:
This was a watchable if somewhat flawed genre effort. The main likable factor in the film is the sense of straightforward slashing that goes on with the idea of the friends trapped in the woods and finding a killer involved. As there’s a workable sort of story involving the group of friends venturing out into the woods for a camping trip and finding themselves stalked by an inhuman serial killer as this doesn’t strain things too much with unnecessary elements being added onto a story that can support a flimsy setup that occurs here, this one works nicely in that regard. The idea of the group coming across the zombified killers and bringing them back to life to continue the rampage makes for a fun enough time at points with the body-hopping ability keeping things interesting as well due to bringing previously assumed dead victims back to further torment the characters in addition to the usual series of stalking scenes featuring the killer killing off everyone. None of these really stand out or are impressive at all, but they give this a somewhat intriguing energy in the second half does pull this up just enough.
There are some issues with this one bringing it down. The main drawback to this one is the limiting low-budget qualifications that manage to become quite apparent at points here. This one struggles to get anything remotely interesting going for large stretches of the running time as the cheap budget is contingent on simply showing the group wandering around the woods hanging out, trying to get to know each other, or encountering the random stranger who shows up simply for the body count. Considering nothing happens from these encounters and this one tends to rely on conversation more than anything with the even more obvious sense of an illogically awful filmmaking process during this time highlighting even more how cheap everything is. From a fuzzy, washed-out look that makes everything have a soft glaze that’s immensely distracting, unsynced audio that changes in intensity throughout here, and a lack of genuine light that makes it impossible to tell what’s happening.
On top of that, there’s also the other issue with the cheapness here as the film cannot capitalize on the main driving factors a cheap slasher effort like this should have. The killer is an unimposing specimen who isn’t even taller than the cast which gives everything a decidedly silly feel rather than the fear of someone who’s going around killing people in the dark. Moreover, the inability of the kills to focus on or feature any kind of blood or gore at all with the weak special effects rendering everything into a series of aftermath shots involving fake blood smeared on their bodies if that even gets featured as several others are killed off-screen so it’s not like even that gets a chance at being shown. Being left with a confusing motivation for what the whole rampage is supposedly based on and some disappointing missed opportunities for character development with the first half not doing anything to fix that, there are some problems with this one.
Overview: */5
A cheap and generally dull indie slasher, there’s enough here to keep just barely out of the lower rungs of the genre but has more than enough issues to leave it massively disappointing overall. Really only give this a look if you're a devout fan of this kind of indie slasher while most others out there should heed extreme caution if not outright avoid it.
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