In short: She Came From the Woods (2022)

1987. It’s the last day of summer camp in picturesque Camp Briarbrook for the year. While the kids are carted away in a bus that won’t make it far (spoiler?), the counsellors have the usual nightly get-together of teen melodrama, horniness (this being a movie from the 2020s and not the 1980s, little comes of that), spooky stories about the local urban (woodsy?) legend, and, um, a blood-letting meant to conjure said legend up.

That little ritual works out rather well, and soon the counsellors are beset by possession, an invisible, dangerous force, those kids that didn’t make it far, and whatever else the film wants to “homage”.

And with “homage”, I mean rip off without much of a creative direction beyond fandom, for yes, She Came from the Woods is yet another throwback 80s affair whose only independent ideas seem to be to add some diversity to the cast without actually doing anything with that diversity, sprinkle in lots of gratingly unfunny humour, and just copy stuff from better movies.

Among the film’s other problems is a cast of characters that’s much too big to provide space for anyone to become interesting. Because this is the self-conscious kind of throwback, there’s no possibility for the film just accepting or wallowing in the characters’ inherent tropiness either; yet it’s not substantial enough to do anything better.

The script suffers from a much too complicated backstory that gets exposition dumped at the dramaturgically worst possible moment, and is neither clever nor weird enough to need to be that complicated. The plot really only consists of set-up and characters stumbling around stupidly, broken up by occasional murder, so there’s very little here that seems worth of anyone’s time.

Three Films Make A Post: Late night bites.

Ten Minutes to Midnight (2020): Erik Bloomquist’s movie is an interesting bit of mainstream feminist indie horror with Caroline Williams as an aging late night radio DJ to be surprise replaced with a younger model spending her last night on the job – possibly – turning into a vampire. I say possibly, because the film really plays out like a seventy minute or so dream sequence in which Williams’s character loses it, falls into shitty memories, and tries to react to the horrors inflicted on women in the public who dare to get older. For about forty minutes or so, I found this combination of consciously weird performances by everyone not Williams, somewhat disgusted social criticism and dream-like imagery rather interesting; the final half hour turned into a bit of a chore to watch because dream imagery and budget surrealism will take most films only so far, and where an escalation, a deepening or a resolution were needed, the film really only reiterated.

Milford Graves Full Mantis (2018): This documentary by Jake Meginsky and Neil Young (not that Neil Young, alas, even though that would be fantastic) is an exemplary documentary about the great free jazz percussionist Milford Graves, using long monologues of its subject about his philosophy, ideas about music and the world, and music and the heart, as well as the universe, the body and music, shots of Graves’s fantastic garden and other documentary material to make the intellectual and musical world of the man palpable, understanding and explaining him through his ideas (some of which sound highly eccentric, but also make total sense for Graves), his body and his musical practice rather than the historical approach most music documentaries use. Which seems perfectly appropriate to the man’s body of work, and free music as a whole.

Thus the documentary achieves something very rare: deepening the understanding of music that isn’t always easy to understand and letting the viewer leave with the feeling of having a much better grip on what man and music are about without editorializing for a second.

Mirage (1990): Visually and as a mood piece, Bill Crain’s desert-set slasher is a true hidden gem, turning the wide open spaces of the desert into a cold, claustrophobic nightmare land with the best of them, using the shape of the black truck of the killer haunting it and stalking the characters to greatest effect.

On the script level, the film does take a bit too long to get going, attempting somewhat deeper characterisation than typical of the genre, but suffering from an inability to make the characters actually interesting as well as from a mostly indifferent cast that, apart from final girl Jennifer McAllister, barely seem to make it through their lines.

Of course, one doesn’t really go into a slasher for interesting characters, and the mood here’s so strong, I found myself not caring.