Vicious VHS Viscera!

Film Review: Don’t Go In The Woods (1980)

Director: James Bryan

How to make a horror film poster lesson #1: try not to make your victim appear as if she's enjoying being murdered

Sounding more like advice to someone badly needing a shit in a forest rather than a horror film title, Don’t Go In The Woods is James Bryan’s notoriously amateur slasher for which I could no longer provide excuses not to watch. Having bedded down for the night amongst the conifers and carnage, read on to find out if my sanity survived the slaughter...

Another victim to the DPP’s seemingly arbitrarily blacklist, …Woods was a condemned “video nasty” of the early 1980’s moral outrage that saw horror films rapidly disappear from VHS stores amidst prosecutions and even jail terms for those supplying said tapes. (Ever get told that the Tories are basically libertarians? Just point to the 1984 Video Recordings Act and allow yourself a hollow, grim laugh).

Having seen it for myself I now wonder if the government hadn’t been acting as kindly yet over-stern film reviewers with a draconian approach to enforcing their opinions.

Slightly better, though still leads people to erroneously
call it "Don't Go In The Woods...Alone!", which it's not.

Because it is, of course, awful.

I mean, never less than entertaining in its purest sense, yet Don’t Go in The Woods is still utterly inept filmmaking in every respect. You could write the plot summary on the back of a stamp and still have room left over for “also by the same author”. To elaborate, four hikers go camping in the woods. They are pursued by a feral madman. He also kills several other woods-dwelling visitors who have nothing to do with anything. That in itself is an unnecessarily convoluted explanation.

The photography is astonishingly amateur. Establishing shots are poorly-tracked pans of trees and scenery, the likes of which a tourist with a handycam would probably erase with shame from his travel videos prior to a family screening. The camera haphazardly wipes its lens all over the vistas like a teenage boy’s tongue on a breast. Every last bit of scenery is crammed into the film’s mercifully meagre running time when usually, a quite simple static shot would suffice.

More impartial reporting from our ever-vigilant tabloid press

The cast is a contradiction in terms. These people couldn’t have been cast. It’s simply inconceivable that the director would have held auditions in which lines were read and decisions made based on the sounds coming out of their mouths. It’s not simply bad acting; that would imply a judge-worthy level of performance. These are people being filmed whilst saying words, no more.

The most spirited, and consequently terrible, is the lead male I got to know as Pink Shirt Peter. His excruciating performance is pitched somewhere between hysteria and blind frenzy; as if an arachnophobe was forced in front of camera whilst the director dangled a giant spider just out of shot. Projecting facial expressions to a theatre full of blind and deaf kids, his ultra-caffeinated presence makes Barry Chuckle look like the master of understated nuance in comparison.

"Actor" Jack McClelland in sombre mood

And here he extends his range

Infuriatingly, the “best” characters get offed in the first reel, though admittedly naming your favourites in this film is a bit like nominating your least objectionable Nazi war criminals. There’s sleazy but endearing caravan couple Dick & Cherry (geddit?) and a female victim who’s both a roller-skating sun-kissed burst of cheer and a magnet to the lascivious affection of the blubber ball sheriff. Of whom, he’s not exactly what you’d call a reassuring presence in the face of danger thanks entirely to his excessively casual approach to personal fitness (the man would lose a race to a bronze statue).

Pistol-cocking Sheriff Fatman

The killer, a cross between Brian Blessed and a shot-putter’s armpit, is a sort of Bear-Grylls-gone-postal and at least a genuine menace to the inhabitants of the eponymous woods. His motivation for the butchery is never made clear, though his macabre corpse-laden dwellings are observed in a scene that’s more than a little influenced by the infinitesimally superior Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And if we’re to draw unfavourable comparisons even further, a wheelchair-bound character meets his grisly maker in a scene somewhat less harrowing than in the afore-mentioned masterpiece.

The score, a much-derided aspect of the film is, curiously, that which is most successful. An ugly and cochlea-kicking cacophony of Casio it may be, but its sheer relentlessness is genuinely unnerving. The powerful stab of electronica that accompanies every murderous attack lifts the often drab action to a level of near-competency. And that’s the best compliment I can possibly muster for the whole experience.

"What do you mean, 'shit'?!"

Is it shit? Hell yes. Is it watchable? Arguably. If, like me, you intentionally sit through a film because of, rather than despite its faults then yes, by all means, spend a further 82 minutes of your precious finite lifespan gawping at this primary school production of a movie. It barely has a script, yields sub-standard acting and contains gory lashings of improbably absurd violence, all set to the sonic insanity of a Bontempi being played by someone wearing boxing gloves.

Do bears shit in the woods? On the strength of this, certainly. And they don't clean up after themselves either.

3/10