Girl in Woods is out today. Read our review.
After at least forty good years of horror cinema, we should
have learned the essential life lesson that nothing good ever happens when
people venture into the woods. Adding a person who suffers from some sort of
severe psychological disorder like schizophrenia means that bad things are
bound to happen. This is not a love story or a Disney princess romance. This is
the classic tale of boy takes girl into forest, boy dies, and girl gets lost in
the forest and proceeds to lose her damned mind. During her time lost in the
forest, we witness her gradual transformation and emotional breakdown, venturing
into her complicated and troubled past as a child.
It’s hard to actually pin down this movie, as it combines
elements of various horror subgenres. It’s a psychological thriller, a slasher
film, and an urban legend origin tale. Maybe it deserves its own new subgenre –
“psycho-slasher-urban legend.”
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| Holy crap!!! It's log. It's better than bad! It's good! |
The movie is beautifully made. It has lush scenic images of
the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, with lots of footage taking place along a
river. The score is adequate enough for this type of feature. There is a decent
amount of gore and violence to satisfy most horror fans, with the nightmare
sequences being particularly chilling. The acting is decent, mostly focusing on
actress Juliet Reeves London as the main character who is mentally unhinged and
slowly growing worse. She does a good job of playing multiple personalities in
her role as Grace. The other main actors, Jeremy London, Charisma Carpenter,
and Lee Perkins are all good in the minimal time they are on screen.
There are several problems with the motion picture. First
and foremost is the pacing. The first third of the movie runs really slowly and
mainly consists of Grace walking around the woods. There are also many
questionable decisions by her that seem like the audience was just supposed to
accept, and chalk it up to the mental illness.
The other main issue is that this character and situation never outdo
the ones that we have already seen before.
She isn’t crazier than Norman Bates in Psycho or Jack Torrance in The
Shining, who both obviously had some mental problems. She doesn’t out-slasher
Michael Myers in Halloween or Jason
in Friday the 13th. This
doesn’t create a better urban legend than Candyman
or The Blair Witch Project did.
It’s all unfortunately middle-of-the-road, creating an
average, but not great, horror picture. I would recommend Cub over this, which has many of the same themes that are focused
on in this one.
Score
-Raul VanTassle