As someone who explores abandoned buildings, I love watching movies about the hobby, as they are rarely ever realistic and provide a nice laugh. Red Woods is one such film.
The premise is cool: a group of people embark on a days-long trek into the woods to check out some abandoned houses and begin to find some strange things: a bloody mattress and a forgotten cemetery. The cinematography is gorgeous; they have some professional cameras, stabilizers, and a drone. The effects are pretty good and it's clear they spent some money on things.
The problem is everything else. The editing cuts bizarrely mid-sentence multiple times and it seems several scenes of plot are just missing altogether. The last half of the film becomes nearly incomprehensible. There are way too many characters and no one acts remotely like a normal human being would.
For example: the bodies. Both groups find dead bodies in these abandoned homes yet don't bother to tell each other and are joking about it less than a minute later.
Then that night for some reason one character attacks another and a random man shows up and tells a scary story to which NOBODY questions why he is there other than someone whispering 'who is he?'
The next day someone, I didn't even know who, disappeared. Then our characters find some cliche hillbilly's and murder them in self defense, which again doesn't bother them.
There is also a VERY confusing subplot about a "first team" that left beforehand they are going to meet up with and two of the group possibly being some sort of x-files type government agents.
I can only imagine that writer/director Nicholas Danko watched a lot of the popular urbex videos with clickbait titles such as "found bodies!" "Secret test lab!" Etc and based this all on that.
Found footage movies are meant to suspend our disbelief more so than a regular film, essentially telling the viewer 'hey, this is real' but literally nothing in Red Woods would make someone believe that. In addition to the previously mentioned issues, the acting by just about everyone comes off as kids in a high school play. The psychic girl, Jack (referred to as Jax in one scene by everyone) is the only one that shows some minor talent, and her friend is passable. The woodsman explorer guy, Cross is so horrible in his 'breakdown' scene after falling on a body that it gives new meaning to the word 'stilted'
Red Woods should have been a simple, fun setup but Danko is unable to tell a coherent story. Slick production levels alone do not make it watchable either.
