What happens when a filmmaker doesn’t provide a regular stream of fodder in their cheap slasher flick? Not a lot of good, that’s what.
Backwoods, sprung from the mind of Dean Crow, who directed and has a story credit, is about as low rent as a slasher can get. The budget looks to have been somewhere in the four figures, and the majority of the film takes place either in the woods or in a rundown house. The movie has a total of six cast members. That’s it. Six. Including the slasher. That meant there were not a lot of bodies for the bad guy to pile up. Not only that, there was not a single on screen death attributable to the slasher. How does one make a slasher flick, and the slasher has the lowest body count of all the characters? That’s quite a storytelling challenge Crow set for himself.
From the waning days of slasher flicks’ golden era, 1988, Backwoods follows couple Karen and Jamie (Christine Noonan and Brad Armacost) as they hike into the low mountains of northern Kentucky for a bit of camping. The area they chose used to be home to a fundamentalist Christian sect that wanted to sever all ties with civilization. They died off, as so many of those sects did, leaving behind nothing but local legends about the spooky woods they inhabited. A local ranger (Gary Lott), tries to steer them elsewhere, but Karen is determined to head into that dark stretch of wilderness.
The following morning, a commotion leads the couple to woodsman Eben (Dick Kreusser), and his daughter, Beth (Leslie Denise), who is choking to death. Luckily for her, Jamie is a doctor, and performs an emergency tracheotomy on the forest floor. In thanks for saving his daughter’s life, Eben invites the two back to his house for dinner, and to pitch their tent in his front yard.
Eben is an intimidating figure. It doesn’t seem as if he has had human contact for a very long time, and his manner would be enough to make any reasonable person very nervous out here in the real world. Only Jamie shows some concern, but Karen is oblivious to how unsettling their situation is.
Then, Eben’s son, William (Jack O’Hara), arrives on the scene. He’s the geek of this film’s alternate title. He can’t form words and doesn’t know his own strength. His meals consist of chickens he kills with his teeth. William, upon seeing her, develops an unhealthy fixation on Karen, who reminds him of his mother.
This flick is 85 minutes long, and, by my reckoning, 58 minutes of it was setup. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It took over an hour for the first alien to appear in Aliens, and that’s remembered as a very well-paced action flick. That’s what good storytelling can do. It can keep a viewer engaged even when the preliminary stuff takes up the majority of a film’s running time. Dean Crow did not have the storytelling chops of James Cameron, however.
Backwoods is a dull, dull, dull affair until William snaps and goes on his rampage. We are also treated to some curious decisions. As mentioned, William, the actual bad guy of the movie, has zero on screen kills. One death happens off screen, one is of natural causes, and one is referred to during exposition. That’s three opportunities to throw some blood and guts the viewer’s way that Crow decided to pass up on, and there could have been more.
It may be shallow to expect that a filmmaker toss some bodies a viewer’s way just to keep them from being bored, but this is a low budget slasher flick, not a contender for Palme d’Or at Cannes. A trashy movie needs to be trashed up, not crammed front to back with Eben’s observations on life. The only thing that keeps this movie from being totally unwatchable is O’Hara. When he starts running around and hissing at everything, the film picks up quite a bit. He was a genuinely disturbing slasher, and Crow had no idea how to use him.
Dean Crow seemed to do everything he could to make his movie less watchable than it needed to be. As such, Backwoods falls way down into the nether reaches of the Watchability Index, displacing Mazes and Monsters at #501. I watched this movie so you don’t have to.