She Came From The Woods

 One of the perks of doing a genre film is that there are a whole lot of conditions and signifiers that can effectively shield a movie from a lot of the criticism you can hurl its way. Is it a horror comedy? Then it doesn't need to be scary. Is it a slasher movie, especially one that harkens to the 80s? Then you can have insufferable characters, as much sleaze as you want, and the plot doesn't really matter as long as the stalking and kills are good. Is it low budget? Well, then I guess I'll overlook all the cut corners.

 None of these things are going to endear the movie to anyone outside its intended target audience, but as long as you have a good take on the few things that matter, some personality or, well, something to latch onto, people are going to forgive a lot.

 By choice and circumstance, Erik Bloomquist invokes all the examples I used above for his 80's throwback She Came From The Woods. What's more, he and sibling/script co-writer set the film in a summer camp and center it around the counselors on the very last day of camp, once the kids are all gone. That's... a very specific set of associations.

 As soon as they're alone, the counselors gather for some really, really mild debauchery, which includes the camp's resident wiseass, Peter (Spencer List) enacting a blood ritual to summon local boogeyman Agatha, a local witch supposedly executed years ago at the site for (I shit you not) botched homeopathical treatments or some such. I guess that counts as comedy, maybe? That these twenty-somethings are thinly drawn, deeply unlikeable, and act as if they were fucking twelve is... well, I refer you back to the first paragraph.

 Soon Agatha rises up and turns a few people at camp into murderers, most memorably turning the kids into a mob of marauding moppets. And that is pretty much the only flash of inspiration to be found in this movie. Other than that it's a complete bust, and that pointedly includes the few things it had to do right to get by: the humour, the kills, the suspense.

 It's almost as if it's not even trying. The problem with cutting genre stuff so much slack is that it opens the door for this sort of... I don't want to say low-effort, because getting even a tiny movie like this made takes a lot of people and a huge amount of work - but it allows certain movies to squeak by with nothing to provide except a certain sense of familiarity.

 I don't anyone involved here said "hey, the Friday the 13ths were shit*, let's just crank some nostalgia bait out". But aside from a technical level of competence that immediately puts it above... oh, I don't know, Camp Hell or something, it's all so sloppily put together, so bereft of anything of interest that it might just as well be.

 So let's start with the good: The production design and basic cinematography are fine. A couple of actors are ok. There's a nice burning man stunt, a couple decent makeup effects, and the fact that the menace is more supernatural than a dude with an axe shows some early potential. The movie never made me laugh,  but a handful of tongue-in-cheek moments I found (very low-key) amusing: a douchebag's cavalier attitude towards burning to death and subsequent final act of sleaziness, a pizza delivery dude interrupting the scheduled killings and chases, that sort of thing.

 For the bad, I'd just point you at everything else. The film's tone is all skewed; There are a couple of bad jokes at the beginning, mostly involving young kids being inappropriate, and a few later on - but the movie takes itself inexplicably seriously for long stretches, making the botched attempts at levity fail even harder. So the comedy's dead on arrival, and the scares are laughable.

 Even worse, the kills are fucking staid, other than the psycho kid mob. There's some variety to all the the murdering... as long as it's boring and mundane: axe chops, stabbings, rock to the head, shotgun blast to the head - all done with next to no elan. There's a lot of blood but very little gore; One well-made head crushing aside you can ignore the rest. Even the requisite exploding head is done with very crummy-looking CGI.

 The acting is terrible, with a couple of exceptions who are undone by their terrible characters. And the script... oh man, where to even begin. It pisses away the potential of the villain with a wall-to-wall series of contrivances, pointless escapades, and lazy, lazy errors and handwaving. A few examples: The resident douchebag outright murders another counselor in front of a colleague, and it's never brought up again; A group of murderous campers are imprisoned at one point, with one exception- but when the time comes for that escapee to kill someone, the murderer ends up being one of the other kids, one whom we know is locked away. A key bit of data regarding Agatha is revealed... by a character just deciding to go over boxes of old files, with no discernible motive to do so. 

 The mythology is fucking inane - the menace is inconsistent and, in the end, pretty, uh, unmenacing. A (conceptually nice) bit of fireside exposition is not just boring, it includes an admission of wrongdoing that is both unnecessary and unintentionally hilarious; The biggest laugh of the movie comes at its own expense. 

 

 Seriously, just don't bother with this one unless you feel a compulsion to watch every horror summer camp movie ever made (and if so, my sympathies). We need to stop giving shit like this a pass (it's currently standing at an inexplicable 73% over at Rotten Tomatoes) just because it looks like horror comfort food; Maybe then people will wait until they have something to offer before offering it.
 One can hope.

*: I shouldn't have to say this, but: the Friday the 13ths are categorically not shit and are, for the most part, a lot better than people give them credit for.