User reviews

We gave this a go, so often there are a lot of movies with low(ish) ratings and people may skip over these.

It starts off feeling a bit weak, sure the actors &/or director/s are not stars, yet forgiving some of these shortcomings the plot is actually very serious and is being built from the beginning.

It gets seriously creepy further in.

We enjoyed it as a late night movie with some snacks :-)

With bad acting, fun B-movie gore and special effects, and some ridiculously bad writing, this film is admittedly not good but still can provide some entertainment. While I enjoyed the gore which is clearly a portrayal of classic 70's/80's slasher films, non-gore scenes were too painfully bad in spots to make this a good movie. Basically a group of young adults camp near a marijuana farm in Northern California, and they soon get caught in a calamity of aliens and murderous meth addicts. The story is unique and I definitely liked the premise, but it had too many flaws to really blow me away.

Like I said, I enjoyed the gore and the unique premise, most of the rest of the film was pretty bad. Acting was terrible all around with the exception of one of the actors. The scenes in between the gore/action/kills was also painful to watch, with poorly written dialogue, and scenes of conversations that I found boring and felt like skipping to get to the kills. Some of the plot-lines were also totally un-needed, one in particular is so out there I almost laughed. But with that said, I still enjoyed the majority of the film.

I would recommend it if you have nothing better to watch.

Welcome to Willits: Directed by Trevor Ryan and written by Tim Ryan

I knew it was too good to be true. I watched three movies recently and this one was the third I watched but the second I'm reviewing. The reason for this is simple, I want to get this madness off of my chest. I watched two good movies and then this one came along and threw me for a loop like a close call car accident. This movie is called Welcome to Willits. It takes place in Willits, California. I imagine the director is from this region. The town really plays no part in the story.

Having this take place in this particular town set in the Emerald Triangle( huge area of marijuana farms) doesn't play into the story much. This movie is about a crazy man who thinks that aliens are invading and trying to abduct him and perform terrifying and painful experiments on him. Kids on a camping trip looking to score. It sounds like an interesting idea for a horror film.

Well Netflix told me that this was a comedy. They lied. This is a weird movie. It starts out with this fake cop show starring Dolph Lundgren for no particular reason. The aliens thing along with the crazy man wearing a tinfoil hat might have been somewhat funny in the writing process but in the movie itself, it really doesn't register that way. They might want to rejigger their algorithm.

This movie feels really long and it takes more than half its running time to get to the meat of the story. It is all set up. It forces us to spend a bunch of time with stock characters and following this dull and overused plotline. It's a boring mess of a movie.

I want to call a moratorium on kids going into the woods to party and finding something evil hunting them movies. It's enough. We need to a break from this overdone story. I'm going to file it with zombie films. I give this movie an F.

This movie reminds me of the time Lois Griffin said, "I said a bad movie not an abortion".

I wanted to like it I thought it might be going somewhere or might make sense in the end... It didn't on either front. This. Was just crap Hate to write a review like this but it's not worth your time

Nothing particular new here. As a B movie its quiet fun. I don't think anyone expects the Shining here. Dont recommebd if your looking for something terrifying.

Well, just finished watching Welcome To Willits, and the least I can say is that it was an experience. Unfortunately it was not a good one. I wonder if they did it on purpose to make it that bad. That might be a possiblity when I think back about it. There are so much things that are wrong with this movie that it becomes funny. In the days were you can find marihuana like almost anywhere they managed to have the worst imitation fake marihuana ever shown on a filmset. They really didn't know any dopehead to just borrow his weed for a second? I think for that alone they should get a prize. The alien costumes were actually the only things that were okay. The acting was seriously bad, aspecially from Sabina Gadecki as Peggy. That was just unreal how bad it was. I think she might really have been on drugs in this movie. The story is what it is, not the worst but due to all the bad ingredients it's just a terrible movie.

Welcome to Willits isn't a perfect film, but most of its flaws come from clear budgetary constraints. The film itself is at times laugh out loud funny and can also be tense and very frightening. While it won't win any awards I found it to be one of the more entertaining horror films I've seen so far this year. If you like insane horror comedies like Tucker and Dale vs Evil or even stuff like Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy give this one a look. It plays very much like a low budget version of those films.

The concept was really good...the acting and effects weren't all that great, and it could've been a lot better if it left the audience wondering if the aliens were real or really just a figment of a drug induced imagination. I did, however, enjoy the movie, and for a low budget film, the story line was really interesting. I think it's worth watching if you're into low budget, syfy type movies.

Oh right, this movie. I checked it out with some family members because it was where I live in Northern California so I was eager to check it out. I thought it was going to be a good thriller but it wasn't! This movie really disappointed me so much that I kept wanted to turn it off. This film did not have a plot at all, they just focused on the brutal violence and the exposure of human flesh being yanked out of corpses, which was really gross. I really do not see a point of making this movie just to give a small town a bad reputation due to its population of meth-heads and pot-heads. Worse yet, due to the title of a town, it wasn't even filmed in Willits! It was filmed somewhere else in Louisiana, and Willits is NOT located in Louisiana! If they plan to make a movie giving a small town a bad name, at least film it in the right location, instead they just added the image of the Willits sign in the intro, and then the rest of the filming was in Louisiana.

So... the cover of this dvd indicated Dolph Lundgren vs aliens. Guess what? This was not the case. What we get here is a no name cast and a plot which involves drug hallucinations and killings of a camping team. Yes, Dolph is in this, but in a weird on the TV set, television programme sort of way. Dolph isn't even relevant to the main plot. Acting throughout is ok and the special effects are ok. The storyline though doesn't go anywhere and you are left wondering what is the point of the film. On a positive the film is very short at 1 hour 20 minutes long and doesn't outstay it's welcome. Overall a very weird experience best not suffered twice.

Well, that sucked... bad storyline, horrible special effects.... it doesn't even deserve a review....

That movie was a bad acting ********, and Culkin's little brother efforts to save it were useless. I give it 3 stars only because of him, otherwise it would have been 1star...

Save yourself from watching it

More than anything, the film is a commentary on the area (Willits, or just Northern CA in general). Perhaps there's something extra in the film for those of us familiar with that area, but seeing some of the less than glowing reviews below I'm pretty sure that everyone is just missing the snark. The film is incredibly well written and directed, and contains a fair bit of wry, intellectual humor and wit hidden by the gory, overwrought plot. This is why it gets 10 stars out of me. I don't even like horror (but I do like aliens), but I kept incredulously laughing through the whole thing because of sub-commentary that runs through it.

A group of youths make camp in the backwoods of the "emerald triangle" in Northern California (where there are numerous marijuana farms). Unfortunately, they trespass on the land of a paranoid man and his wife (Bill Sage and Sabina Gadecki), who evidently believe in malevolent aliens. Anastasia Baranova plays their visiting niece.

"Welcome to Willits" (2016) is low-budget horror that starts with similarities to "Night Skies" (2007) and "Extraterrestrial" (2014), but takes a different path, not to mention adds some droll humor. Anyone who appreciates flicks that involve horror in the forest, whether the antagonist is a psycho or a creature should find something to like. "Berserker" (1987) and "Into the Grizzly Maze" (2015) are good examples, although the Indie budget is closer to "Night Skies" and "Berserker" than the other two, only costing $464,770.

Both Sabina Gadecki and Anastasia Baranova are attractive, particularly the latter (although their roles downplay their beauty here and understandably so). On the other side of the gender spectrum, Dolph Lundgren appears in a throwaway role.

The film runs 1 hour, 24 minutes, and was shot in Shreveport, Louisiana, with some stuff done in Los Angeles, not to mention an establishing shot of the entrance to Willits, which is a half-hour drive from the coast in Northern Cal, a 3-hour drive south of Willow Creek and a slightly less drive west of Oroville.

GRADE: B-

Tried watching this on 4 different streaming channels. Bad writing, bad acting. On top of that, you hear background music and background noise, but you don't hear the dialog. And we are using 4k surround and TV with a Roku Ultra.

I had a lot of fun watching this movie, and considering the budget and subsequent impossibility of having top actors performing, I think the acting is pretty good. The brothers Ryan did an excellent job writing and directing this movie, and as a previous user wrote, some people are missing the snark.