The Woods Are Real

The majority of high reviews are all accounts that were created 3 months ago, use generic names, and have only one review (this one). Coincidence? I think not. Beware the acclaim of those involved in production: they are but tooting their own horn.

Honestly, I couldn't even get past the opening scene. The acting is SO bad. Wooden performances of equally wooden dialogue. Not surprisingly, this is a "Christian movie" and like many of it's predecessors it values using actors of the faith over actually talented actors. I couldn't bear to slog through 65 more minutes of horrible acting so I turned it off.

This may be a finalist for worst movie of all time. Now, there are two kinds of bad movies: so bad they're good and so bad they're unwatchable. This is firmly in the latter camp. Two of the most fraudulent, dislikable people on earth go to a cabin in the woods to better understand how it changed their friend's life. It COULD have worked. It would have required the filmmaker to have fun with the idea. He did not. Every second of this pretentious crap is deadly serious. One gets the feeling that the filmmaker has never had a moment of fun in his life and wants his audience to be just as miserable as he is. Don't fall for it, don't bother watching this sorry mess.

I was really enjoying it up until they ran out of the house, including the very obvious religious metaphors which usually make many movies with religious undertones unwatchable for myself much sooner, but then it just completely lost any sort of direction. It's a pity because I found it nicely filmed and the acting was above average for most of the cast. The dialogue went from bad to worse to absolutely ludicrous. Skipped through the last 20 minutes because I couldn't be bothered to follow increasingly nonsensical things the characters were saying. I don't usually give movies a 1 star if the cinematography does it for me, or especially when I started off enjoying the first 10 minutes. That's just how bad it got though.

1 star final verdict.

Don't waste your time with this one. It sells itself as something else, has zero character development, random "unsettling" events that we're supposed to accept as mysterious or nefarious, and for what? There's no payoff. You waste your time waiting for an incredibly weak ending that is nothing more than someone's delirious mess of a sermon from their own personal mount.

Maybe you're the type who enjoys being pounced on with a surprise sermon, but it doesn't matter: you'll feel assaulted by an awful story with a paper thin plot, zero direction, and barely an ounce of imagination.

The god botherers should stick to trolling random social media threads if they can't even be honest about what they're selling.

It's true that not all horror films serve as mouthpieces for Christianity-there are even a few examples that condemn church leaders-but nearly any horror film that touches on the supernatural will either condemn the faithless ( The Conjuring, The Rite ), frame non-Jesus religions as spooky (The Wicker Man, The Exorcist, Sinister ), or claim that Biblical prophecy is coming to pass (Legion, The Omen). Even slasher films with no ties to religion often dabble in moralistic tropes against drugs, premarital sex, or doing anything the least bit salacious.

But this was a dull movie with no horror scenes. Simply horrible.