The Woods (2006)

recommended

Awesome Movie

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Yes, The Woods looks great, has decent performances... and, at its core, is a nasty little story about haunted trees. A dark little fairy tale. Too bad the director/writer/editor/whoever felt like they needed to toss in loads of misdirection and 'red herrings' to make the story seem more complex than it really was. It ends up being a mess... a pretty mess... with Bruce Campbell in it... but still a mess. Yes, it's obvious what's going on... no, I wasn't confused... but I was annoyed that the folks making it kept TRYING to confuse me. The story isn't deep or complex... stop trying to make me think it is.I think the people who made this should be sat down and force fed viewings of Rosemary's Baby and Suspiria... since those are the sorts of movies they seemed to be emulating, badly.

Made under the watch of MGM and then MGM was purchased by Sony, The Woods fell into the hands of a studio who could care less about the thing. After being re-edited and having release dates pushed back again and again, The Woods was unceremoniously dumped straight to video and with the final twist of the knife, Sony removed all special features from the DVD and released it bare bones. The Woods deserved a better fate and while there are some issues throughout, the film has a remarkable atmosphere, the cast is uniformly good and the cinematography and art direction is quite nice. The ending is not so much botched as it seems a bit rushed and incoherent, especially considering the slow burn pace of the rest of the film. Agnes Bruckner wisely underplays her role as a semi-disturbed girl sent to a boarding school, where the school is a coven of witches. There are a few jarring shots of a girl screaming at the camera at the end of a dream sequence which are not only out of place, but a down right embarrassment of editing and failed scares. That aside, the film has a dreamy, hallucinatory feel which is a bit disconnected, but overall the film has many qualities worth seeking out.

This movie is in 1965 and it moves along at that kind of pace. NOT a bad thing to my mind. Mommy doesn't daughter Heather for setting a fire and convinces daddy dear Joe, played by Bruce Campbell, to place her in a all girls school in, wait for it, the woods. As the show progresses two girls go missing when a fog enters the dorm. They are replaced by piles of dead leaves that are found in their beds. One girl who has been trying to help is found hung in the dining room. Before she is killed she has called daddy and he comes out with mommy dearest to take Heather back home. In case you haven't figured it out the teachers are all witches and cause the car to go of the road and coming up against a tree. Not a good thing in this film. Mommy gets killed, daddy and daughter go to a hospital where the head witch slits her palm and forces the blood (?) down Joe's throat thereby making a drone of him. Heather is dragged back to the school. Here she ends up taken to the crypt(?) where several of the missing girls are wrapped in tree limbs waiting to be taken over by the spirits trapped in the woods. Bruce throws up the witches brew, escapes the hospital, goes to the school where he finds an axe. He uses on a witch but gets tossed to the ground where the tree limbs start to wrap him up. Heather as used the distraction to break free and grabs the axe. Man does she wail away she chops 3-4 of the coven before slicing the root of the head witch. This apparently is all that is needed as all the teachers drop dead. It also frees daddy. The ending shows Heather burning pages from a test plus other things. The very last scene has Joe and Heather walking down the road with the rescued girls. Well done and not just some blood, guts, and gore for shock value unlike so many horror films today.

The woods is directed by Lucky McKee and written by David Ross. It stars Agnes Bruckner, Patricia Clarkson, Lauren Birkell, Rachel Nichols, Bruce Campbell and Kathleen Mackey. Music is by John Frizzell and Jaye Barnes Luckett and cinematography by John R. Leonetti. When Heather Fasulo (Bruckner) causes a fire at her parents home, they have her sent to the secluded Falburn Academy. A place of strange people and strange secrets.It sat on the shelf for a couple of years and finally got released to home formats in 2006. Eagerly anticipated by fans of Lucky McKee, who had given horror fans the well regarded "May" in 2002, it's a solid genre offering with some nice visual flourishes. Yet it's too clichéd for its own good, a collage of other genre movies that the director clearly adores. There's too many questions hanging in the air, left unanswered, why is Heather the key to the finale? What purpose does her "powers" serve the plot? How do parents know about this school and how come nobody is making enquiries about obvious missing children over the years? One cop? Really? It's 1965 but you wouldn't know it from the dialogue. And on it goes, a ream of holes keep opening up in the screenplay and the director frantically tries to cover them up with some nifty slow-mo work, or a bloody image. While the CGI in the grand finale is more comedy than horror and kills the suspense that the makers were clearly trying for.There's good performances from the cast, across the board, and it does look real impressive on a visual level, but the writing and all round familiar feeling renders it very ordinary indeed. 5/10