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32%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #10,891
...out of 20,725 movies
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While hiking in a remote forest, college student Zack disappears, leaving nothing but a bloody trail for his traumatized friend Tom. Now a year later and plagued by nightmares, Tom returns to the woods with Zack's girlfriend Jenny in a last attempt to find out what happened to his friend. Following a trail of dead bodies, each one bearing a bleeding scar, Tom and Jenny soon find themselves unraveling a string of cryptic secrets and caught in an intense struggle not only for their sanity, but their survival. Everyone in the small town seems to have a secret and when the dreaded scar suddenly appears on Jenny, the two race to find out what evil dwells in the woods.
--TMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: November 25, 2006
Tom (Randy Wayne) and Zack (Brad Pennington) are a couple of typical frat boys who decide to go hiking in the woods for the weekend. It's all good, clean fun, until they come across a cabin in the middle of nowhere with an extremely attractive young woman standing outside. Zack decides to use his manly charms on her, and this woman, who introduces herself as Cassie (Klara Jolesz), invites him in for a cup of lemonade while Tom stands in the bushes and contemplates emptying his bowels (no, seriously). Once inside the house, Cassie immediately starts coming on to Zack, and it doesn't take long before they're on the couch making out. However, once the shirts come off and things start to get interesting for lover boy, Cassie decides that this probably isn't a good idea and tells Zack to quit. Zack, being highly aroused by this point, insists on continuing, prompting Cassie to scream at him to get off of her. This in turn leads to Cassie's mother (Rochelle Vallese) hearing these screams from outside, grabbing an ax, and murdering what she perceives to be the man raping her daughter. Tom decides to investigate after his bowels reach the point of explosion (no, seriously), and he founds out what we at home already know - his best friend is now dead. The two ladies discover him poking around, knock him out with the business end of a shovel, and...
Fast forward to a year later. Tom has fallen into a deep depression over the incident, and when Zack's girlfriend Jenny (Ashley Nelson) decides that they should go out to this cabin to find out what exactly happened, he agrees. The duo pulls into a town near the scene of the crime, where they immediately encounter the asshole sheriff (Joe Estevez) and the spiritual-minded hotel owner (Dee Wallace-Stone), both of whom seem quite unwelcoming of strangers in their town. Things get a little more interesting after Tom and Jenny do some investigating at the cabin, however, as they discover that the two ladies who were responsible for Zack's death supposedly died ten years ago.
Although the general storyline behind this movie has been done to death, I thought that there was still room for a movie to pull it off in an interesting fashion since it may have been done repeatedly, but it's rarely been done right. After watching this, I still hold that same opinion, but sadly, this isn't one of those rare films that gives us an excellent adaptation of the classic story.
For starters, it seems as though writer and director Rahil Bhorania read "1,001 Thriller Clichés" as the lone primer for his debut film. Everything you'd expect from a lesser thriller is found here: the twist ending, the fresh-faced teens, the needless romance, and of course, plenty of "jump" scares. The problem is that none of it works. The twists are either blatantly obvious or completely illogical, and it seems as though half of them are inserted merely for the sake of having one more twist. Things happen with little rhyme or reason, and we as an audience are supposed to just lap it all up without questioning the motives behind them. This wouldn't have been quite so bad had the director been a little more competent with the scenes leading up to the numerous twists, but that wasn't to be since it seems as though he merely watched the last twenty minutes of all the recent thrillers for ideas and skipped everything dealing with character development and storytelling.
Then we have the "goods", or the lack of them as I should say. The "goods", for those not in the know, usually depend on the type of movie, with the main ones being blood, breasts, beasts, and of course, scares. Not every movie requires all four, but when putting together a horror film, you generally need at least two of those items to keep the audience interested. The problem here is that none of these are delivered on - the blood and murders use an obscene amount of horrific CGI effects, there are no breasts (although Klara Jolesz is quite hot), the "beasts" are two fine-looking ladies, and the scares are nothing more than ominous music followed by the typical "jump" scare (you know - you think something is about to happen, but all of this buildup is paid off with a mere cat jumping out of the cabinet). Had the storyline been even slightly interesting, I could have forgiven everything within this paragraph; however, since it wasn't, I sort of expected some sort of redemption and found nothing.
Avoid this one at all costs. 2/10, and those two points are awarded only for the novelty of watching an obviously gay actor attempt to pull off both the bad-ass hero and the Casanova lover role at the same time. There are some roles that certain people should never attempt to play, and this casting decision ranks up there with the worst of them.
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