DON’T GO IN THE WOODS (1981)

DON’T GO IN THE WOODS (1981)

Tagline: For some, a simple warning is never enough.

(Horror, Thriller, Forest Full Of Nightmares) [R]

There’s a lot of pressure under that kind of stress, and he might, he might become irrational. 

In this one, Craig, Peter, Ingrid, and Joanie, go camping and backpacking in the mountains. Everything seems cool for about 5 seconds, then a crazed killer starts hacking up tourists in the area. 

I know you just read that intro and you are like “so far so good”. Unfortunately, this movie’s plot really does stop there. We don’t get an interesting back story, we don’t get competent acting, we don’t get coherent filming that doesn’t make this movie just seem like a highlight reel of 80’s forest mayhem (at least for the first half). 

Unfortunately, the lead male Craig is played by James P. Hayden, and this dude cannot act at all. As a character, his lines in this are pretty nuts and even by 80’s standards, no one would have been friends with Craig and not need counseling afterward. Craig isn’t even the killer, he’s just a jerk. It actually appears that James P. Hayden never had another role after this. I hope he found success doing other things. Mary Gail Artz plays Ingrid and is pretty terrible as well. However, Mary Gail Artz was a very successful casting director that ended up working on 70 movies. Not sure if she is still active or not, but her last credit was in 2016. We get a similar situation with the woman that played Joanie. She can’t act either, but she’s been massively successful as a producer with 27 credits and was still active as of 2020. She was also the director for 6 projects. I didn’t recognize anyone else in this movie, but director James Bryan worked on a bunch of films aside from this.

For a slasher, there are lots of crazy moments in this film, but I am looking at this cheese-o-meter and it’s off the charts in SLEEPAWAY CAMP II land. The killer in this thing looks like he was on the set of CAVEMAN and just walked off after some sort of labor dispute.

The night scenes are really bad regarding our ability to see anything, but a lot of this movie happens during the day, so it’s not the end of the world. I will say there is almost no score at all in this movie. Everything you hear until the final goofy song seems to be just whatever forest sounds were going on. There is no tense music, no screeching violins, none of that usual horror movie stuff. 

Overall this movie is full-blown cheese meant for 80’s horror fans that love provolone, but the first half is just a mess. The direction is horrible and the editing is extremely annoying. You can do full cheese without all these issues. Maybe you can squeeze a few laughs out of this one due to the arts and crafts on a budget effects, but that is about it. 

For me, this is a 2 out of 7, not really worth your time or your Halloween-Horror-O-Thon. 

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF JFB AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

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