Couché, les monstres

This convoluted rapscallion debacle seems to fancy itself a horror/comedy of sorts. Now, I've seen my fair share of flicks in this particular subgenre, and EVIL IN THE WOODS exhibits nothing in consuetude with any of them...or with movies in general, for that matter.

The twisted corpus of this cinemerde royale concerns a little boy checking out a book called EVIL IN THE WOODS from his local library, and reading from it a fractured fairytale about a group of filmmakers confronting...well...evil in the woods. And just what is "the evil", you might ask? Um...that might include some folks in janky rubber trick-or-treat masks, a dimestore Sasquatch, an alien, and a witch who lives in a deep-forest tumbledown shack(which has a curiously out-of-place modern refrigerator). Also inclusive to this anarchic salmagundi are a couple of midgets and a narrator who talks like Gomer Pyle, intermittently dictating the text of screencards for, presumably, the blind and subliterate.

A migraine-inducing backyard home-movie which is so structurally distempered that it might actually appeal to a select few on some freakish, OMG*WTF level.

2/10. Beyond bad...beyond bizarre...beyond belief.

This is probably the movie with the lowest budget ever made. But that what makes it so cool. The actors are...what can I say? Not that good, but that is just why I like it. You can really feel the bad acting thru the screen in to your bones. For most of the actors this is the only thing they´ve done (and I understand why). But it is funny and different and I actually recommend it to everyone that´s not so hung up on famous movies with good actors. I prefer this one instead of all those "mega" budget movies. Evil In The Woods gets a 8/10 in points

Evil in the Woods is a mess of a movie. While intended more as a comedy (or possibly a spoof), there's relatively little humor to be found in the film. Instead you get random for the sake of random with odd editing compounding it.

The film is about a boy who finds a book at the library which talks to him (he can hear a voice narrating the story) and tells him about events occurring in present-day Mildew, Georgia. At times you forget all about the boy and the book except for the occasional segue card read by the narrator. The framework does little beyond linking together seemingly disparate film clips. If not for the rare interaction between characters in the individual subplots I would believe that they just mashed two or three separate movies together.

Most of the movie concerns a production crew filming a movie featuring bigfoot and aliens. They're having problems shooting the movie between equipment issues and crew members going missing. A local witch and her cannibalistic "family" is to blame. While we see this group often, very little is explained about them and their interactions with the others are limited. There's also a couple whose child has gone missing and a sheriff although they all have limited screen time. And a character who dies in a brief flashback early on.

The actual "evil" in the woods is never clarified. References suggest it to be some sort of entity although, within the context of the story, it could just refer to the evils going on in the forest (murder, cannibalism, witchcraft, etc). At any rate, the evil is billed as having been there for "three thousand and three years" and, whatever it is, the locals all appear too scared of it even to warn visitors.

All things considered, this should have really been a fun movie. The set-up is amusing, especially the scene with the librarian, but most of the time it's just dull and quite often confusing. It feels like the movie was squeezed together to compensate for missing footage, which could explain some of the random twists.

The opening title scenes, nearly the first ten minutes of the film, are filmed from a lower angle, giving us the perspective of the small child, the lead character, as he walks through a neighbourhood in downtown Atlanta on his way to a library. Whilst there, he annoys an annoying librarian before picking up the book, "Evil In The Woods". Apparently he didn't notice the hardback pressing of The Satanic Bible sitting nearby it? This little kid then proceeds to hear an unknown individual narrating the book for him, as we wade through a flashback taking place "somewhere near Mildew, Georgia, 1956", which is completely pointless and leads to absolutely nothing, except a song about nachos and tequila. What the bloody hell?

A breathtaking sequence involving a guy and girl, having an affair, being attacked by the smallest Bigfoot-type of creature imaginable. "Take 2!" The guy and girl being attacked by a Bigfoot-type of creature. Again. But from a different angle! Was "take one" from a blooper reel? Was the entire movie just a series of blooper reels?

Toupees on fishing lures, witches, aliens, and midgets are included for no apparent reason. Those things hardly seem like the "evil in the woods" the kid is reading about.

Not even amusingly bad, just boring; film has a (deliberate?) stream-of-consciousness vibe to it, as though the people making this filmed one subplot until they grew tired of it, and then switched to filming something completely different, and then repeated that process numerous times, and this incredibly boring and confusing, wholly forgettable time-waster is the result.