Don't Go in the Woods...Alone (1980)
Cast: Nick McClelland, James P Hayden, Mary Gail Artz, Ken Carter, Larry Roupe
Director: James Bryan
Synopsis: Grisly shocker initially banned by the British censors as a depraved "video nasty"
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

 

This attempted hybrid of The Hills Have Eyes, Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre can be regarded as either: A) an ahead-of-its-time precursor to the Blair Witch-style of hand-held forest terror; B) a blistering satirical indictment of Reaganomics and its neglected underclass; or C) quite simply one of the most stunningly atrocious films ever committed to celluloid.

The film opens in cinéma vérité style—or, to put it another way, looking like an unedited home video shot on an ancient camcorder—with a squealing woman apparently running for her life from some unseen terror deep within the hostile forests of the Oregon backwoods. She doesn't get very far before whatever is pursuing her catches up and (we assume) kills her. It all happens conveniently just off-screen.

Elsewhere in the forest—presumably only a few hundred yards away—a group of carefree trekkers head off on a camping expedition while assorted other fools flock to the place as though it were Palm Springs or some major tourist attraction. A nearby birdwatcher is suddenly splattered with some unpleasant gunk before having his right arm lopped off for no immediately apparent reason.

Meanwhile, our happy campers settle down for the night, only to be savagely attacked by somebody resembling a cross between a rotund Taliban fighter, a Viking and Worzel Gummidge.

Before this, however, we are treated to a wonderfully surreal interlude involving a newly married couple relaxing in a trailer. The stunning young bride attempts to romance her husband, although something clearly isn't quite right. This breathtaking beauty—whose acting somehow manages to be every bit as dreadful as her appearance is sublime—provides one of the film's more memorable cameo performances.

The plot thickens as we slowly realise there is a homicidal bagman charging up and down the forest carrying what appears to be a shoe-shine boy's wooden box while merrily slaughtering anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path.

Can nobody stop this vicious, cackling lunatic before he reduces Oregon's entire trekking community to dog food? Can anyone survive the Viking's grisly assault? Or perhaps the more pertinent question is whether any viewer can survive the sheer, undiluted awfulness of the film itself.

Because, against all odds, if you do somehow stagger all the way to the closing credits, you will finally be rewarded with the movie's undisputed highlight—the utterly inspired end-title theme song, which may well have been the final straw that persuaded the British censors to ban the film before eventually relenting years later.

Sing along now...

Don't go out in the woods tonight,
You probably will be thrilled.
Don't go out in the woods tonight,
You probably will be killed.
There's a friendly beast who lurks about,
Likes to feast—you won't get out,
Without being killed and chopped up into little pieces.

The ban itself remains utterly mind-boggling because the gore effects are so laughably cheap that they provoke laughter rather than revulsion. Perhaps the censors simply considered the film too dreadful for the public to endure without suffering permanent psychological damage. If that were indeed the case, one could hardly blame them.

This is phenomenally dreadful in virtually every department. The background score must rank amongst the worst ever composed—every bit as excruciating as the staggeringly awful Drive-In Massacre, another film with which Don't Go in the Woods shares an alarming number of similarities: astoundingly bad acting, a spectacularly unattractive cast, a microscopic budget and, naturally, a soundtrack seemingly composed by somebody being slowly strangled.

I first encountered this notorious video nasty during the glory days of the early eighties, when video classification was still in its infancy and all manner of cinematic sewage found its way onto video shelves throughout Britain.

Our local video nasty peddler in Southfields, just around the corner from the hallowed tennis courts of SW19, never failed to stock the latest banned atrocity, and we were amongst his first customers when this particular title appeared.

More than twenty years later, my memories had inevitably become a little hazy. I distinctly remembered the astonishingly awful soundtrack and recalled sitting there absolutely dumbstruck by the film's breathtaking ineptitude. Revisiting it all these years later, Don't Go in the Woods still possesses the remarkable ability to astonish with its staggering incompetence.

What continues to baffle the mind, however, is how the hopelessly deranged British censors ever concluded that this deserved banning in the first place. My own theory is that the producers secretly begged Mary Whitehouse and her merry band of moral crusaders to outlaw it, fully aware that nobody in their right mind would willingly watch something this catastrophically awful unless they happened to be as gloriously demented as we were.

The film deserves every ounce of ridicule that has been heaped upon it by the five people unfortunate enough to have seen it. It merits every accolade of awfulness imaginable and surely belongs amongst the very worst films ever made, comfortably rubbing shoulders with its close cousin Drive-In Massacre.

Both films seem perfectly designed for the dying American drive-in circuit, where they could serve as background wallpaper for amorous teenagers with no intention whatsoever of watching the screen. Even that, however, scarcely excuses their almost total absence of quality.

The unforgettable scene in which one of our supposed heroes accidentally impales an innocent man before repeatedly whimpering, "Oh... I'm sorry... I'm sorry... I'm sorry..." as the poor fellow expires, has to be seen to be believed.

Don't Go in the Woods is, without question, a towering piece of shite.

Those incapable of appreciating cinema at its most magnificently wretched would be well advised to steer clear, because films simply don't get much ghastlier than this.

Majestically foul.

Almost inspired in its awfulness.