RETRO REVIEW: DON'T GO IN THE WOODS (1981)

NICK CLELAND as Peter and MARY GAIL ARTZ as Ingrid in DON’T GO IN THE WOODS. — **NICK CLELAND** as Peter and **MARY GAIL ARTZ** as Ingrid in **DON’T GO IN THE WOODS**.

The Greek philosopher PYTHAGORAS famously stated: “leave the road, take the trails.” So often, we are consumed by the trappings of our modern society that we forget to take in the beauty of the road less-traveled, the wonder of the natural world, and the majesty of the outdoors. However, as this is a movie review and the movie in question is JAMES BRYAN’S 1981 low-budget slasher, DON’T GO IN THE WOODS, the aforementioned “trails” are literal paths to death and dismemberment, awash with blood and bad decisions at every turn.

A killer lurks in the forest in DON’T GO IN THE WOODS.

PLOT:

In DON’T GO IN THE WOODS, a group of obnoxious campers venture into the woods for what they assume will be a fun-filled weekend in the outdoors. However, unbeknownst to them, a bloodthirsty maniac killer is hiding in the woods, watching, and violently killing them (and other visitors that come across his path) off, one by one.

Low-fi gore galore in JAMES BRYAN’S slasher, DON’T GO IN THE WOODS. — Low-fi gore galore in **JAMES BRYAN’S** slasher, **DON’T GO IN THE WOODS**.

KILLS:

If you are looking for a literal revolving door of deaths, you’ve come to the right place, as DON’T GO IN THE WOODS is essentially one giant outdoor set piece for gory kills, racking up a healthy total of 16 deaths in the course of its lean 84-minute runtime. The entirety of the film vacillates between our wilderness killer picking off random outdoor enthusiasts (by the way, this forest is lousy with people), and our core group of campers: Craig (JAMES P. HAYDEN), Peter (NICK CLELAND), Joanie (ANGIE BROWN), and Ingrid (MARY GAIL ARTZ).

If I talked about all the kills in this film, this would be a freaking 10-page review, but I’m not, so it ain’t. However, I would be remiss to not give some pretty wild highlights from this horribly-lit little slasher. Among them are a couple named Dick and Cherry, who are camping out in the woods in a VW bus decked out in pink and gold shag and red hearts. Of course, Dick bites it when he goes out to investigate a noise and then the killer starts in on Cherry in the van, coming a-knocking and making that van a-rocking, so much so, he actually throws it over on its side like a deleted Hulk scene from THE AVENGERS. The van proceeds to then roll down a hill like a Slinky on a championship run, until it finally bursts into flames with Cherry still in it.

We also have a birdwatcher that gets his arm cut off, a fisherman that takes a bear trap to the face, as well as a guy in a wheelchair get his head lopped off, causing it and the rest of his body (still in the wheelchair) to go over the side of a mountain in a kind of macabre homage to “that scene” from MAC AND ME.

In perhaps one of the more gruesome deaths, we see a woman out in a clearing of the woods painting a landscape, her young toddler nearby in a baby bouncer that the mom has attached to a tree branch. The killer ambushes the mother, viciously stabbing her repeatedly with a spear, sending big upended buckets of blood everywhere as she falls dead to the ground on her canvas. In the next shot, we only see a now-empty baby bouncer, and as we see no blood or dead baby (believe me when I say, I don’t think the filmmakers would have had any issue putting in a dead baby into this film if it served their purposes), we realize it’s been kidnapped by the killer.

Local authorities search for a killer on the loose in DON’T GO IN THE WOODS. — Local authorities search for a killer on the loose in **DON’T GO IN THE WOODS**.

VISUALS/SFX:

Hey kids, do you like ADR (automated dialogue replacement)? Well, how does an entire film of ADR sound? I’m not sure why the filmmakers had to redo every single damn line of dialogue in post, but I’m guessing that as the film was shot pretty much entirely outdoors (in Brighton, Utah to be exact) there was just way too much noise and ambient sounds to get any clean dialogue with their crappy mics. Not that the dialogue is exactly ripped from an AARON SORKIN screenplay - it’s only function is to move the razor-thin plot along - but I do wonder how the original dialogue compares with the flat, monotone final product we got from the actors.

The film was shot on a budget of $150,000 in outdoor locations, partly in order to save money on the film’s lighting, and holy cow, does it show. The whole film is so poorly lit and photographed that I found myself squinting and straining to see what was happening in scenes, even in kill scenes, which is not good when the whole point of your film is the kills. Even the outdoor shots, which should be breathtaking and beautiful, considering the location they shot it in, are either washed out or dark and shadowy (even in daylight scenes).

However, if you like your gore cheesy and bloody, DON’T GO IN THE WOODS does deliver on several fronts. The effects are obviously all practical and the filmmakers seemed to ascribe to the belief that you can make any bad slasher film better if you just throw a ridiculous amount of blood at it. When one of our campers gets caught by the killer near the end of the film, the carnage that follows is brutal and so soaked in that corn-syrup red stuff that it’s not surprising the film made the list of 72 DPP “video nasties” back in the eighties.

TOM DRURY as “the Maniac.” — **TOM DRURY** as “the Maniac.”

PERFORMANCES:

Once again, the horribly dead albatross that hangs around the neck of this film is its entirely dubbed dialogue. It’s stilted, wooden, and flat - and granted, this is a slasher film, so the discourse between the characters is going to be secondary - however, what dubbing also does is take away the dimension of an actor’s performance. What an actor captures in the moment of a scene, whether it be fear, excitement, dread, gets lost when they have to go back in a recording studio weeks later and redo it under dramatically different conditions. None of these actors are going to win any awards unless it's a RAZZIE, but I give them props for trudging through these woods and doing what were likely 100% of their own stunts.

As “the Maniac”, TOM DRURY looks like an extra from the movie WILLOW by way of JACK BLACK. We never get his backstory, but can only deduce by his crudely fashioned spear and the multitude of animal pelts he wears, that he is some kind of crazed mountain man, surviving by killing tourists and stealing all their stuff. Thankfully, since he never talks, all his dubbed grunts, snarls, and yells don’t lose as much resonance as the other characters. He’s just there to kill hikers and take names.

Campers fight to survive the night in DON’T GO IN THE WOODS.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS:

The film is inarguably a mess all the way around, with dialogue and scenes often cropping up without any context, and the dubbed lines only serve to enforce the audience’s confusion about what’s happening and who we are following from scene to scene.

That being said, there are some gems that make this a slasher worth watching (hell, I own the Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray of it). The kills are at turns both fun and brutal, not to mention plentiful. There are even some smart twists that make it surprising to watch. At one point in the film, the remnants of our main group of campers are evading the Maniac, whose stabby killing stick is adorned with trinkets that make noise when he moves. At one point, when he knows that Peter and Ingrid are near, he smartly leaves behind the stick for an unsuspecting hiker to find (once again, this forest is lousy with people). The deception works, and when a poor hiker finds it and takes it with him, making a bunch of noise from the jangling trinkets on it, he is unceremoniously run through by Peter moments later, who mistook him for the killer.

The ending itself is a dread-filled enigma, as we finally see that the tot that the killer kidnapped was left at his cabin, presumed dead by the authorities and ominously lightly hacking at the dirt with a hatchet, perhaps to take the Maniac’s mantle of the killer of the woods. Filled with low-fi gore effects and black humor, DON’T GO IN THE WOODS is the kind of slasher film you just let wash over you in a sea of dyed corn syrup and inventive kills. While from time to time, it may be liberating to head to the trails and escape the endless minutia of our modern lives, we would be wise to heed the words of Craig when venturing out off the beaten path: “Never, never go in the woods alone.”

The kill count racks up in DON’T GO IN THE WOODS. — The kill count racks up in **DON’T GO IN THE WOODS.**

THE GORY DETAILS:

According to director JAMES BRYAN, actor GERRY KLEIN, who plays the guy killed in the wheelchair, was once at a screening of the movie and couldn't quit laughing during his scenes. This annoyed a woman sitting in front of him. She turned and said to him 'that's not funny, what if that was YOU in that wheelchair?' , which only made Klein laugh more.

MARY GAIL ARTZ (who plays Ingrid) later became a major Hollywood casting director and cast such films as HALLOWEEN II (1981), THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993), SERENDIPITY (2001), HOUSE OF WAX (2005), KISS KISS BANG BANG (2005) and many others. She never starred in any other film, besides this one.

The roles of the many nameless victims of the maniac were played by various crew members or friends of the filmmakers. These murder scenes were shot on weekends prior to principal photography.

The entire movie was dubbed after being shot. The voice of actor FRANK MILLEN was dubbed by director JAMES BRYAN because Millen wasn't available for the audio looping sessions.