Don't Go in the Woods (2010)

DON'T.

Occasionally when watching movies, there's the moment when everything falls into place right at the end, when everything you've been sitting through finally makes sense.  In this movie's case, it was when the first two credits read "Directed/Written by Vincent D'Onofrio."  In case this name doesn't immediately launch your brain into reciting the SPOOKY REVEAL music from Saw, this was the directorial debut of the guy whose two big roles were Pvt. Gomer Pyle in Full Metal Jacket, and more important for professional haters like myself, perhaps the worst goddamned character in modern television, DETECTIVE ROBERT GOREN in Law and Order: Criminal Intent.



Don't Go in the Woods is billed as a HORROR MUSICAL, but it's honestly more like a full length music video that turns into the world least interesting slasher in the last 10 minutes.  The plot is that there's a band led by an Elijah Wood lookalike that goes into the woods to write some new music, they run into some boring hippie girls, and there's apparently a mysterious slasher though if you've seen a single modern horror film you can probably guess what the truth is.

The big thing about this movie is that the music does not fucking stop.  If you're a big fan of Bright Eyes type music, the kind that is endless acoustic guitars and too-clever-by-half lyric metaphors about love and pain, you'll probably like this movie.  I've been listening to The Paper Chase lately, so you can probably gauge how I reacted.  But here's the thing, as alluded to above: there is absolutely zero pace to the movie.

Oh, I know what you might be thinking: "great another boring horror purist that gets his panties in a wad if a female isn't brutalized at least every fifteen minutes."  And it's true, I do tend to get a little forgiving of a slasher's faults if it can at least maintain some sort of consistent body count during the film.  But experimentation is fine, if the non-dead space (hurr) at least has some sort of ostensible point.  Wolf Creek spent an hour following some tourists around in order to have you build a relationship with them before ripping their hearts out.  With Don't Go in the Woods, there's no apparent reason that the watcher is subjected to 70 minutes of terrible actors failing Kindergarten improv when they're not breaking out into musical numbers about feeeeeeeelinnnnnnngs.  Maybe D'Onofrio just hates movies

I also feel duty bound to state that if you're wanting to watch this movie to see some twee motherfuckers get graphically butchered, don't bother.  I'm not sure where the movie's $100,000 budget went, but it sure as fuck was not for SFX.  Despite the decision of giving the killer a sledgehammer as the signature weapon, the only gore you see are some severed body parts and bodies that could be charitably described as "not obviously rubber when examining them after being subjected to 80 minutes of music so maybe my brain is just totally dead."