You’re in for a very nasty surprise.
Contrary to its title, “Girl In Woods” is a movie about a girl lost at sea. No, i’m kidding, she’s actually lost in the woods.
SPOILERS AHEAD
But how did she get there? And what is she up to? Well, Grace ( for that is her name) got there because her boyfriend is an idiot who thinks walking twenty miles into dense forest with no mobile coverage is a good idea, especially when the woman you are taking with you has a history of serious psychiatric issues. Even more bizarrely – and suspiciously convenient from the screenwriter’s viewpoint – the guy is so dumb that he somehow manages to accidentally blow his own head off! I guess nobody ever taught him that loaded guns shouldn’t be left muzzle upwards, nor placed under one’s chin! This tragic and highly unlikely event leaves our titular girlie in a tight spot. She has no idea where she is, or how to get back home, so she decides to wander around the forest going slowly insane…
Actually, not that slowly. Within a day or two she is seeing dead relatives and monsters that aren’t there, and soon she is holding debates with two different hallucinations of herself. Like i said, she wasn’t exactly all there to begin with, and now she is rapidly approaching her sanity’s vanishing point. But she has more immediate problems, the kind that can’t be fixed with meds. Yes, our heroine is starting to get peckish. And even though she has her idiot boyfriend’s gun and ammo she, in typical girly fashion, really sucks at hunting. So now she’s nuts, her hair is starting to look really stringy, and she is even hungrier than is fashionable. Oh, dear, what is a girl to do? Well, in the wild there are two ways of getting yourself some meat – you kill it, or you scavenge yourself up some nice carrion. Yes, folks, our gal has become so hungry that she decides to dig up her dearly beloved and feast upon his carcass! It is unclear exactly which choice morsel she washes and then cooks over a roaring fire, but it’s not the one you filthy bastards are thinking of! I suspect it’s his heart, which gives the whole thing the kind of morbid romanticism that would have delighted Edgar Allan Poe – or made him throw up.
Meanwhile, poor Grace’s disintegrating mind continues to alternate between hallucinations of some anthropomorphic creature stalking her and memories of mommy and daddy. Daddy, it seems took his own life by – you guessed it – blowing his brains out all over the bedroom wall. Or did he? Maybe, maybe not. And now comes the twist to the story. Actually, there are three twists but the first and third are less predictable and more pleasing to the morbidly inclined. After debating the matter with her two imaginary selves, Grace decides that it’s time to kill the anthropoid critter what has been stalking her. Not only will this ensure Grace’s safety from the supposedly predatory creature, it will also provide her with the protein she’s been a’missin’ since her boyfriend’s carcass ran dry. So she stabs the creature to death, and proceeds to roast it over a slow fire. But what’s this? Suddenly we see several hectic shots of Grace killing not the creature but a female hiker, tearing her gear off and carving her up like a big turkey! Yes, folks, Grace has gone so batshit crazy that she is now killing and cooking poor schmucks who stumble into the wrong part of the woods! Now, that i did not expect at all, and that’s always a pleasant surprise for someone who has seen thousands of these things. Then comes another somewhat more predictable twist – it turns out that Grace’s mommy was a bit of a psycho who decided to settle an upcoming custody dispute with Grace’s daddy by convincing Grace to shoot daddy dead and make it look like a suicide! No wonder the poor kid grew up to be a really messed up psycho cannibal! And then, at the very end of the movie, comes the third and best twist – Grace is permanently lost in the woods, totally and irrevocably insane, killing whoever comes along, and soon becomes a semi-legendary mass murderer like something out of The Hills Have Eyes! It’s kind of a downer of an ending but it is also a pretty cool and creative one that serves as a possible explanation as to why the horror genre is so full of forest-dwelling psychos. Somewhere in their background, there may very well have been a grandma or granddaddy just like Grace…
“Girl In Woods” is not a great movie, but it is a good one worth watching at least once. It some times drags and has that ludicrously convenient death at the beginning, but its main twist makes it more memorable than most horrors, and every important aspect from the cinematography to the FX is effectively and professionally handled. Why the hell almost everyone else on the ‘net seems to hate it is beyond me! I can only assume that these people are idiots who watched a completely different movie. I, for one, am hoping that there will be a sequel in which our legend-in-the-making goes around killing, butchering, and roasting many more folks – preferably starting with her critics!