Blackwoods

This German-financed, low-budget thriller is undermined by a listless script and annoying slickness in the editing. The lackluster performances don't help and when all is said and done, it's really just a public-interest morality play. A flash in the pan for late-night cable viewers.

Neat psychological thriller about a man who has a guilty past that just won't go away.

Matt, Patrick Muldoon, goes on a trip to the country with his girlfriend, Dawn, Keeger Tracy, to meet her parents and realizes that the place where they live is where he killed a girl in a car accident some time ago. Matt starts to relive that event over and over until it drives him out of his mind.

Good use of scenery and even better use of plot and actors by director Vwe Boll of how the minds subconscious is able to bring back events that we would like to forget. Released for video but as good as most films that have theatrical runs, with good supporting efforts by Michael Pare, Samantha Farris and of course Clint Howard as the off the wall motel clerk. The movie ends a bit confusingly but if you use your freeze or slo-mo button, of your DVD or video player, you'll see what really happened to Matt.

Terrific use of and manipulating the scenes by directer Boll in which Matt is in flashback and how those scenes mesh together in the end is what makes this made for video movie as good, or even better then most psychological thrillers that you would pay as much as ten dollars to see in the movie houses.

This has an awful story line. Awful acting. It is not scary. The ending has a twist the ruins the hole thing. It is not good has all. It is a big pile of poo poo with pee pee on it.

Before inflicting HOUSE OF THE DEAD onto the world, in what the trade papers promise to be the first of several awful cinematic adaptations of video games, Uwe Boll made this cheap German-financed shot-in-British Columbia (though set in the U.S.) opus. The box makes it sound like another take on THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, though only a few minutes of the movie towards the end could be considered so. The movie's more of a psychological thriller of sorts, trying hard to bring things together for a neat twist at the end, though the twist is one that's been used in several major Hollywood movies released in the past few years. It's a pretty dull and cheap affair for the most part, with a lot of unanswered questions such as that nude sequence near the end. Muldoon gives another sleepwalking performance that makes you wonder why he's a star even in the direct-to-video market. The movie's also not helped by Boll's *frequent* penchant for flashforwards (which naturally spoil some things to come), flashbacks (a number of which are not only repeated, but way too many times), and awful use of blurry slow-motion in these segments *plus* the "normal" parts of the movie! At least Clint Howard brings some welcome comic relief in his few brief scenes.

On a road-trip to meet her family, a couple get sidetracked by the residents of a small-town community who are seemingly trying to kill him, but as he spends more time in the area, he begins to see the real reason behind their actions and tries to stop them before he comes to any harm.

There's a lot to dislike here as this was a really flawed entry. One of the biggest is that it's built around one of the most insipid and utterly moronic twists in the genre (it's not the worst, but man is it up there) that basically makes the entire film completely worthless, and when combined with an irritating belief that every single action scene must be shot in slow-motion combined with a camera angle that is so blurred and out-of-focus it's still impossible to tell what's going on. There's almost no gore or even kills happening on-screen and that it's more of a mystery than anything makes it nearly impossible to get into this one and really care since nothing happens. It's got his usual flare for gorgeous scenery, but that's about it here beyond the final chase through the woods which has a rather nice amount of action to it, but it's still too little too late to save this.

Rated R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence and Brief Nudity