Dead Wood

I just saw this at the Phantasmagoria film festival and it was one of my two favourite films of the whole festival. It's a terrific horror film with excellent production values and some real scares in there. I was also impressed with the quality of the acting and the script as well. You really identify with the main characters and feel for them as they go through Hell in the woods. There are a few good laughs in there too including a funny and quite touching sex scene. The terrific atmosphere is cultivated with some excellent music and the imagery of the film throughout, including some quite splendid wildlife photography. There are some awesome special effects too but I don't want to spoil any of the best moments. Suffice it to say I was mightily impressed with the film, and it stands a good chance of being hailed as a cult movie. If you are a horror fan it is well worth a watch.

Heading out into the woods on a camping trip, a group of friends stumble upon a young woman looking for her boyfriend and agree to help her only to stumble into a far more dangerous situation than they ever realized.

This here is truly one of the worst, most wretched straight-up horror films in the genre. The fact that this one is so amateurish and hardly ever displays any kind of professional approach and feel is one of the biggest deciding factors about this one's lousiness, as the low-budget feel to the special effects and the visuals about this one are clearly evident quite early and often throughout here. This goes to really hammer home how utterly abysmal this is during the few moments where it's actually worth watching by showing how low the budget of this is since the other rather troubling aspect of this one is the fact that it's just so dull and boring that what does happen here is barely worth caring about. The first near-hour of this one is spent with these completely unappealing people who just sort of aimlessly wander around the woods just not doing anything that makes us care about either couple here. Not only are they blatantly stupid about splitting up away from each other when they have incredibly accurate evidence of something out in the woods with them, there's also other such scenes as the women letting their boyfriends go skinny-dipping with another naked woman they just met earlier in the day, ignoring all signs of danger to hide out in the creatures' lair as well as knowingly throw themselves at someone when they're in the situation with a shapeshifter, and that's just the start of it all in here. The characters in here are just plain stupid and they're not in the slightest bit interesting, so placing them in a situation where nothing happens and when it does there's just no professional appearance to it all really works against this one. A few encounters are quite interesting, as the struggle to dodge the creature in the woods trailing after them as well as the drowning sequence in the lake while the centerpiece visual effect of a man being turned into a tree does have a rather chilling air to them in theory which seem like something that really could've been used as the basis for a much better effort than this one is for that's about all that this one has going for it.

Rated R: Graphic Language, Nudity, Violence and a mild sex scene.

Kim Newman recommended this in the last issue of Empire. He also recommended 100 Feet so the less said about that man the better. This has precisely two moments where the director actually achieves some semblance of 'horror' and one moment where he clearly blew the budget on one special effect. These three scenes collectively last for about ten minutes of screen time and whilst some understanding of how to frighten the viewer is present they are not worth watching the film for. For the rest of the time you are left with a meandering plot that truly contains some of the worst acting I've ever witnessed and that's coming from a fan of low budget horror/indie/B-Movies for 20 years. The quality of these performances are akin to watching a play performed by an below average GCSE drama group. The acting and dialogue are so poor in fact that I wondered if it was intentional. Sadly the film has a disturbing lack of awareness and is seemingly not tongue-in-cheek in its approach. This is the first review I've ever written but it's all come to head lately as I drift from one disappointing new horror film to the next mainly due to the untrustworthy or shilling production company reviews from the IMDb user comments. It's a joke honestly.

As Macready says 'Trust is hard thing to come by these days'

Saw this at Phantasmagoria. It's an ultra-low budget British horror film about a group of young campers who get lost in the woods but thankfully don't get picked off by a man in a mask. Instead what starts out as a fairly standard slasher setup turns into a creepy and rather effective supernatural horror film. It's actually pretty scary in places too! The excellent writing and fantastic actors help a lot too as you really get to know and like the characters before they get into the story. But the real surprises in this film are the mind-blowing special effects used sparingly for maximum effect. The film is a real achievement and definitely one for horror fans to look out for.

An independent British horror that left me with bitter feelings. I mean, it could have been so good wasn't it for the fact that here nothing really happens. Well, there are things happening but it all starts too late and no blood flows, maybe some parts are a bit scary but it then you are too far into the movie to be surprised. It isn't really a slasher it's more about the supernatural. And indeed, dead wood is the exact word for it. Some kind of ghost appears and make people disappear into trees. The effect is quite effective and that's what people are talking about but as I said, it's bin too late. You are waiting for things to happen, for example, like the girl getting undressed, just when the boobies should be in site they cut over to another part of the story, I mean, if you tease us with nudity than give it. Also that there isn't really blood in it makes it fail too. It's sad, as so many films, it starts of pretty well but then Dead Wood becomes really a dead wood.