[0.75/10] Don't Go in the Woods (2012)

Don't Go in the Woods (2012)

Brief review: It's only the beginning of 2012, and we already have a serious contender for the worst horror movie of the year. Blending horror and musical successfully is not and easy thing to do, not to say it's nearly impossible (well, unless if you're Tim Burton), and actor-turned-director Vincent D'Onofrio fails miserably in his attempt to mix these genres properly. There's too much music and not enough terror in this sloppy slasher, and if the singing was good that would've been okay, but sadly, apart from one particular song sang by an Asian girl around the campfire, the rest of the songs are absolutely terrible. And there's like 20 of them. The typical "a group of teens go into the woods and bad things happen to them" scenario promises boredom, and this is exactly what we get. Generally, nothing happens during the first hour or so, and later on when the massacre begins, it doesn't really make any sense, because the kills are sudden, yet hardly shocking, and we never get to know who the killer is and what his motives for murdering are. Plus, the film is full of pointless dialogues and annoying characters, and despite its short running time, it feels like watching paint dry. The camera work is bland, the editing is lazy, and the direction as a whole is pretty generic and unimaginative. The gore effects are quite decent, but they're not enough to compensate for the absolute lack of scares and suspense.

Overall summary: Dumb, preposterous, amateurishly-executed and completely devoid of any scares at all, Vincent D'Onofrio's crappy debut feature, "Don't Go in the Woods", is both one of the worst horror movies of the decade and one of the worst musicals in film history.