Monsters in the Woods (2012)

The director of this film, Jason Horton, contacted me to see if I'd look at a screener of it. I always jump at the opportunity to do that, especially in a case like his with a microbudget film that's looking for publicity. It's one of the things that, when I started this blog in 2007, I never imagined I'd be doing, so each time it happens, it's just another reminder of how far this thing has come.

Monsters in the Woods is about the making of a microbudget film directed by Glenn Plummer, the cast and crew of which is out in the woods re-shooting some scenes in order to get the film sold. As they're shooting though, problems occur that seem like the usual issues plaguing any low-budget movie set, until they start becoming deadly. What evil could be threatening them, and can they make it out alive?



I'm disappointed, because I really wanted to like this one, but it didn't work for me. The first five minutes were great. We get a couple kids out in a tent doing it, and then they're taken out by some birdman thing. I thought, "sweet, a campy slasher flick with some great bird dudes, this could be a lot of fun!" But then we got the movie-in-a-movie paradigm, mixed with the found-footage cinematic device, and things ground to a halt. For the next 30 minutes we only had Glenn Plummer, some funny dialog, and a couple interesting characters like the script supervisor to keep us involved. Then Plummer dies inexplicably, and the film turns to what should be it's best stuff, with the great monsters and great gore effects that looked well beyond their budget; but here is where the dialog that was so good before is so bad now, that the acting that was so natural before came off affected, and that killed it all for me. We had people who just show up off the street toting guns, discussing their relationship history like the loquacious drunk at the party we all try to avoid; wordy lines like "they have no idea as to what kind of hell that's approaching them...", the kind of buttressing of words with more words you'd expect from a People's Court litigant trying to impress the judge; repeating of dialog in consecutive scenes that cries out for more proofreading; and finally, people withholding information from other characters for no reason, like "where's Bravo?" "Um..." "Tell me, where's Bravo!" Even I was yelling at the screen: "goddamn it, tell him where the hell Bravo is so we can move on!" When things were off-beat, the writing and acting felt like they fit; but when things became serious, everything felt forced, and as a result, didn't work for me.

It might sound like I'm judging this by too high of a standard, that I'm expecting Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender out of a microbudget horror flick, but that's not the case. I'm only judging it by the standard it set itself. Yes, there wasn't a lot going on in the first 30 minutes, but the characters made sense, their conversations were funny, and the situations they were in worked. For instance, the whole thing with the script supervisor being thrust into the film. All of that was great. It's almost like it didn't trust what it had there, and had to pile on more and more stuff; and it never felt right when it became serious. Affected is the best term I can use to describe it. When Schwarzenegger goes into the woods all serious to take down the Predator, it works. When these actors go into the woods all serious to take down some Hellbeasts, it's sauteed in wrong sauce, I'm not buying it, and I definitely don't want to hear them talk faux tough about it. I can get that from any number of short films on YouTube, I'm buying a movie for more of what the first 30 minutes gave me-- with more action, of course.



I listened to about ten minutes of the commentary that came with the film, but turned it off because I didn't want to watch the film in its entirety a second time, and because most of that ten minutes consisted of three guys joking about someone's cell phone going off and what not. Anyway, one thing I did catch in that ten minutes really irked me. They mentioned Glenn Plummer, and Jason, the director, told us how they only had him for one day, so they had to kill him off early in the film because they couldn't shoot that much of him. That's fine. Next he said something about how the way Plummer died was somehow funny-- which it wasn't, it was pretty much how Richard Gere killed his wife's, Diane Lane's, lover in Unfaithful-- and from there went on about how killing Plummer off, even though he was top billed, left us, the audience, thinking anything could happen at any moment, which we know is just a cop out, you killed him because you couldn't afford him, but I understand, you gotta do what you gotta do. But then one of the other people on the commentary joked about how they were able to top bill Plummer, use his name to sell the film, but only have him in for 30 minutes of the movie. He even said something to the effect of "all you young film makers at home should take a note on that." Yes, definitely, we audiences love nothing more than a good old fashioned bait-and-switch. Please, splash an actor's name on the cover so we buy the film, then let us see that he's barely in it. Yes, young film makers at home, treat your audience like a bunch of morons, we love being deceived. I don't put that on the director, it was someone else in the commentary that said it, and I bet the guy that did say it didn't even know how he was coming off, but it does show you that sometimes the people making films don't think about the people they expect to consume their films, yet they still expect us to consume them just the same.

The ol' found-footage technique. All the kids are doing it nowadays. The only thing about it here that I had trouble with, was the added effect of the picture scrambling. I can see using that at specific plot points to obscure information you want us to know later on, but to do it just for effect is annoying. I've spent my whole life dealing with fuzzy pictures from bad signals or bad cable wires, VHS tapes with bad tracking, scratched DVDs, pixelated digital images, and streaming movies that freeze on a slow Internet connection. With all the things not associated with the film that impair my viewing, the last thing I want is the actual movie to do it to me too. Again, I think it's just not thinking about the audience, which is fine if you don't want any of us to pay for it; otherwise, help us out a little bit.



One thing this movie can really hang its hat on though is the special effects. The monsters were great, the blood effects and gore were great, definitely a much higher quality than what you'd associate with a no-budget or microbudget film. The movie also did a lot of cutting away before the violence became bloody, then cutting back for the aftermath. I like that too. And when the film really kicks into gear and we get the bulk of the kills, it's a lot of guys getting killed off-screen and the women that watch them getting covered in blood. This is what I come to low-budget horror for, the camp, the gore, the fun kills, and the creative ways they mitigate their budgetary constraints. I get that a lot of this film was a satire or commentary on what one goes through to make a low-budget film, but in a way it's a parody of itself, the way the Jason, the actual director/scriptwriter, becomes too ambitious with a story that runs away with itself-- as many indie film makers do-- instead of just keeping it simple.

Glenn Plummer as the director was my favorite character in the film. In a way it would've been better had he just mailed it in, because I wouldn't have missed him so much when he was killed off. I have a feeling that, with all the DTV stuff he's done in the past, he relished the idea of being a low-budget director himself and parodying all the overbearing personalities he's had to deal with. The other two characters I liked were the script supervisor (who I mentioned above) and the make-up girl. The script supervisor, played by Ashton Blanchard, is the one on the cover, and according to the commentary, she was written in after another actress bowed out-- similar to the way she was in the film. For some reason though, she gets her face ripped off later by one of the monsters. I felt like shaking my fist at the screen yelling "why movie? Why do you take everything I like and make it bad?", it was not an ending worthy of her character. The make-up girl was cool too, though for some reason she's not in the credits on imdb [I found out from Jason subsequently that this was due to union issues. The actress that played her was Annemarie Pazmino]. There was something about their performances that wasn't nearly as affected, especially when the film brought in the monsters and the script went south.



Finally, the executive producer character was played by a poor man's Andrew Zimmern, the guy from Bizarre Foods. How was that not what this movie was about? Imagine, this Zimmern-esque guy has a Bizarre Foods-esque show that goes into a tribal area, and are warned against going into the woods to get a rare fruit, because there are bird people in there. He and his crew ignore them at their own peril, and madness ensues. I say you mix in Glenn Plummer as either a medicine man, or a hermit in the woods-- or maybe he's an executive in an office calling to find out where they are or demanding they go in and get that fruit. That would be awesome, him in a suit in a high-rise office yelling obscenities into a Bluetooth.

I better stop before I sound too much like the studio exec trying to change the director's film from his/her original vision, making the movie's satire complete-- or maybe my review as a blogger already did that, I just need some shots of me from my parents' basement typing it with Doritos crumbs on my chest. I want to thank Jason Horton again for sending me a screener of his film, and I'm sorry it didn't work for me. For more information on Monsters in the Woods, you can check out their official website at http://www.monstersinthewoods.com/ . I wish Jason and everyone else involved with the film the best of luck both with this and all their future projects, and hope to check out more of their stuff further down the road.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1686902/