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A bunch of
video game designers head out into the
backwoods for a team building exercise - namely
paintball, only to realize that they're not alone.
A religious cult soon captures them, tortures them,
and kills them. Will anyone be able to come out of
this game of death alive or will they all fall prey
of the evil cult.
Wrong Turn meets Severance in Backwoods... only without
the gore, humour and excitement. Backwoods is a very
standard low-rent backwoods slasher flick a la the ones
we used to get in the late 80's. What surprised me was
how similar this felt to the 80's slasher flick "The
Zero Boys". Yes, Backwoods is indeed more of an action
film than a slasher flick, in fact there's not a whole
lot of slashing going on at all. I guess you can't
expect a whole lot from a company that mainly focuses
on making crappy creature features though.
The story here is very basic, eight co-workers head
into the woods to play a friendly game of paintball.
Naturally the woods is, as usual, filled with crazy
rednecks who just happen to be religious fanatics
(horror movies are really giving religions a bad rep
these days, yay). It doesn't take long before the
friends get either captured or killed by the rednecks.
Nothing new here folks. I believe that Backwoods had
the potential to be a terrific horror flick had it
only focused more on actually being a horror movie.
The editing is also rather questionable and the music
is just awful which drags the movie down a lot.
Luckily we have a very strong cast in here who carry
the movie as much as they can. Haylie Duff, the more
talented and relatable one of the Duff sisters, gives
us a very strong performance and Ryan Merriman from
Final Destination 3 certainly does his best. I'm
willing to bet a lot of money on that the script was
a lot better than the end result. Director Marty Weiss
doesn't impress with his work behind the camera and
it's obvious that horror isn't his passion.
In the end, Backwoods really isn't anything special and
certainly nothing that you have to beat yourself up
over if you missed it on TV. I'm sure this will be
released on DVD by Genius later this year but I wouldn't
recommend checking it out unless you're a hardcore
fan of Haylie Duff. Don't expect this to be the backwoods
slasher flick that it wants you to believe that it is
because it's really much more of an action flick than
a horror movie - and it's certainly not a slasher movie.
An impalement and an arrow in the neck. Very dry.
Awful. Just awful. Enough said.
Backwoods could have been a terrific Wrong Turn rip-off
but it ended up feeling more like a forgotten backwoods
horror flick from the late 80's. This is more of an
action film than a horror film though so don't expect
a gory slasher flick because it's not.
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