Cheap Back Woods (DVD) (Grant Woodhill) Price

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Customer Reviews of Back Woods

Someone Involved With the Movie
Some people have far too much time on their hands. Lots of bitterness here. We made this movie in 3 days for $900. It was a fun experiemnt for a bunch of friends to get together and have a good time. Someone at Dead Alive Productions saw it and made an offer. Would you turn down money? No, that would be stupid. Too bad these reviewers got NONE of the jokes. Zilcho. If you wanted to watch something good, you should have watched something else. Oh, thanks for the sale... I love royalty payments. <
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>For the forty year old virgin living in his mother's basement (see review below) that wants to smack me in the face: I relish the thought of you taking a day off of work from your 7-11 Assistant Manager job and doing the deed.

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Completely miserable and bad in all possible ways
Things you can buy just as cheaply as this awful DVD: a six-pack of beer, a supersize fast food meal, a box of condoms, etc. etc. My point being that even if you find yourself spending $3 plus postage for this visual atrocity you will still feel like you got ripped off. The "filmmakers," if you can call them that, should be paying the audience for sitting through this crap.

Don't get me wrong, I love low budget sleaze and horror, some of it shot on video, whatever. But this was by far the worst thing I've ever seen. Looks like a bunch of drunk frat guys got their hands on a video camera and filmed a pathetic excuse for a horror film. If you still need reasons not to watch this, then read on.

First of all, the bad video quality. The cheapest available digital video camera must have been used, since whenever there's the slightest bit of camera movement the screen breaks up into little "pixel" blocks. But that's a minor complaint when you consider how annoying every person that walks onscreen can be. The cover describes this as "dark, demented, and obnoxious." I would only agree with the obnoxious, especially David Hayes as a bloated, idiotic Baby Huey type that definitely qualifies as the all-time worst screen portrayal of a maniac killer I have ever seen. Watching him jump up and down and dance like a drunken toga party reject made me want to smack him in his fat face.

Then you have the terrible attempts at humor, which I won't even get into save the following: there is nothing more annoying than an awful horror film that tries to save itself by referring to established movies in the genre, especially Friday the 13th, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc. Within seconds you get references to all the above, delivered in the clumsiest fashion possible by the wretched cast.

Finally there's the crappy gore FX. Learn how to set up a camera, dude! I mean, given the low budget we expect some bad FX, but come on! In the shovel beating scene you can see that the body being beaten is just a stuffed dummy that doesn't even have hands or feet!! All they had to do was pull in a little closer, problem solved. But what do I expect at this point, right? The violence is not shocking. What is especially painful to witness is the male nudity that constantly invades the film. There is actually an evil spirit character called "Mangina" that is a masked naked man with his privates tucked "Silence of the Lambs"-style, who is continually shown dancing in slow motion. The first glimpse of a character that we get in this film is an extreme close-up of a fat guy's naked butt crack, and that pretty much set the tone for the whole release.

If it's dumb shot-on-video horror with cheap laughs that you are seeking, try Mulva: Zombie A** Kicker. At least that one has some funny dialogue and characters. Back Woods is the equivalent of taking a huge cinematic dump.

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A Serious Review, by Someone Not Associated with the Movie
I cannot honestly say that director Grant Woodhill's _Back Woods_ is the worst movie I've ever seen. The problem is that I've seen Tony Malanowski's _Night Of Horror_ (which you'll only be able to find on an old copy of the VHS, if they haven't all been burned by now). _Back Woods_ is probably the second worst movie I've seen so far, and I've seen thousands (including lots of no-budget horror).

The positive reviews on the Internet for _Back Woods_ can only have a couple explanations. One, they were written by someone involved with the disc. If so, they must have been written only by someone in a position to gain financially from your spending a couple bucks on this turkey (they are probably trying to recoup the $20 they spent on the production plus the thousand or two spent to manufacture the disc and hire the sole professional associated with the project--whoever created the artwork for the case). The other cast and crew can't possibly want you to see this. The only other option is that they are written tongue-in-cheek by people who like to perversely mislead, who think it's funny to say that something is good if it's in fact terrible, and/or who aren't going to go down with a sinking ship unless _everyone_ goes down.

If you read about the movie on the box, _Back Woods_ sounds like it might be worth watching, especially if you like your entertainment on the bizarre side, or if you really enjoy "so bad they're good" films. Both of those descriptions fit me. I love all of John Waters' films. I'm an Al Adamson fan. I like Ed Wood--I even enjoyed watching _Orgy of the Dead_, which is basically 90 minutes of moderately tame go-go dancing. I love Troma. I think that Andreas Schnaas' films are entertaining in a perverse way. Heck, I even gave _Cabin Fever_ a 10 out of 10!

The problem is that if you hadn't read the box, and you tried to give an "objective" description of the film to someone, you'd have to say, " 'Filmed' on a digital camcorder with low resolution by someone overly amused by a couple cheap optical effects, _Back Woods_ is what Texas Chainsaw Massacre might have been like (the plot is a very rough rip-off) if made by a nine-year old who grabbed a handful of people at random in a county park, armed with bottle of strawberry jam for blood, and just made up the film on the fly, with the state park as the only location, in about three hours."

The most aggravating thing about the film, perhaps, is that it wouldn't have to be as bad as it is. It seems like the "filmmakers" made absolutely no effort, in any respect. There is no reason that the whole film has to be shot in a county park, with no sets. At one point, a picnic pavilion is supposed to be a gas station. You know this because they wrote the word "Gas" on a piece of cardboard with a magic marker and placed it on top of a garbage can. The villain, Luther, and his mom, both played by fat men, supposedly just live in the woods. Not in a house, they just stand around in the woods. During a "flashback", one character has a moustache that was drawn on with an eyebrow pencil. There is little concern with editing or pacing (of course). There are scenes where the camera just travels through the woods slowly for a couple minutes, and nothing else happens; there are scenes of someone walking through the woods and calling a name for about five minutes; the scant 60-something minute running time is further padded out with a nonsensical "fast reverse" replay of the whole film at the end; and the director was so amazed that he got the "lead actress" to show her breasts that he lingers on them for about a minute.

They don't even really try to create any gore effects, which usually are the best things about these kinds of no-budget horror films. People like Andreas Schnaas convey a true love for the horror genre, despite the fact that maybe they're not that talented and can't get together a lot of funding for their films. They still make the best horror films they can with the resources at their disposal. On the other hand, people like the crew and cast of _Back Woods_ only convey that they'd like to rip you off for a couple bucks, and want to spend as little money as possible to do it. It's like a three card monte game by someone who can't even be bothered to set up a cardboard box and use real cards--instead they just use the sidewalk as a "table" and draw cards on a couple pieces of scrap paper with an eyebrow pencil.

Surely someone involved with _Back Woods_ lives in a house or apartment. It's not that hard to take a couple rooms and dress them. It's not that hard to find a gas station where the owner would like some free publicity. It's not that hard (unfortunately) to find talented make-up and effects artists who'll work for free, just for the chance to do something in a genre they love. It's not that hard to learn how to shoot coverage and do some computer editing. It's not that hard to find writers who'll donate decent, or at least passable, scripts in exchange only for credit on the film. It's not that hard to locate someone with a home digital multitrack who would record some looping (dubbed dialogue) and maybe some foley (sound effects) for you, so that viewers can actually hear lines the actors say and it doesn't sound like they're inside a plastic cup. But you'd have to care about what you're doing, and care about the genre to make those efforts. The _Back Woods_ team didn't care.