Evil in the Woods (1986) Poster

User Reviews

Review this title
6 Reviews
Sort by:
Filter by Rating:
2/10
Largely incomprehensible mess, partly due to deliberately shoddy editing
Tanuccoon22 April 2012
Evil in the Woods is a mess of a movie. While intended more as a comedy (or possibly a spoof), there's relatively little humor to be found in the film. Instead you get random for the sake of random with odd editing compounding it.

The film is about a boy who finds a book at the library which talks to him (he can hear a voice narrating the story) and tells him about events occurring in present-day Mildew, Georgia. At times you forget all about the boy and the book except for the occasional segue card read by the narrator. The framework does little beyond linking together seemingly disparate film clips. If not for the rare interaction between characters in the individual subplots I would believe that they just mashed two or three separate movies together.

Most of the movie concerns a production crew filming a movie featuring bigfoot and aliens. They're having problems shooting the movie between equipment issues and crew members going missing. A local witch and her cannibalistic "family" is to blame. While we see this group often, very little is explained about them and their interactions with the others are limited. There's also a couple whose child has gone missing and a sheriff although they all have limited screen time. And a character who dies in a brief flashback early on.

The actual "evil" in the woods is never clarified. References suggest it to be some sort of entity although, within the context of the story, it could just refer to the evils going on in the forest (murder, cannibalism, witchcraft, etc). At any rate, the evil is billed as having been there for "three thousand and three years" and, whatever it is, the locals all appear too scared of it even to warn visitors.

All things considered, this should have really been a fun movie. The set-up is amusing, especially the scene with the librarian, but most of the time it's just dull and quite often confusing. It feels like the movie was squeezed together to compensate for missing footage, which could explain some of the random twists.
5 out of 9 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
1/10
Another fractured fable
Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki16 October 2012
The opening title scenes, nearly the first ten minutes of the film, are filmed from a lower angle, giving us the perspective of the small child, the lead character, as he walks through a neighbourhood in downtown Atlanta on his way to a library. Whilst there, he annoys an annoying librarian before picking up the book, "Evil In The Woods". Apparently he didn't notice the hardback pressing of The Satanic Bible sitting nearby it? This little kid then proceeds to hear an unknown individual narrating the book for him, as we wade through a flashback taking place "somewhere near Mildew, Georgia, 1956", which is completely pointless and leads to absolutely nothing, except a song about nachos and tequila. What the bloody hell?

A breathtaking sequence involving a guy and girl, having an affair, being attacked by the smallest Bigfoot-type of creature imaginable. "Take 2!" The guy and girl being attacked by a Bigfoot-type of creature. Again. But from a different angle! Was "take one" from a blooper reel? Was the entire movie just a series of blooper reels?

Toupees on fishing lures, witches, aliens, and midgets are included for no apparent reason. Those things hardly seem like the "evil in the woods" the kid is reading about.

Not even amusingly bad, just boring; film has a (deliberate?) stream-of-consciousness vibe to it, as though the people making this filmed one subplot until they grew tired of it, and then switched to filming something completely different, and then repeated that process numerous times, and this incredibly boring and confusing, wholly forgettable time-waster is the result.
3 out of 5 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
1/10
3030 YEAR OLD EVIL
nogodnomasters24 May 2018
Warning: Spoilers
This is an extreme low budget film from 1986. It is a spoof of low budget "B" movie films and attempt to make itself a camp cult classic with bad photography, acting, dialogue and props. In an attempt to be "so bad it is good" it has achieved the dismal "so bad it is bad."

There was really nothing in the film that invokes horror or laughter, just groans, and not the good kind.

A boy takes a book out in the Atlanta library and reads a story about making a "B" movie while there is a real evil in the woods.

No swearing sex or nudity. No real reason to watch the film.
2 out of 3 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
Slightly less professional than the average South American snuff movie.
EyeAskance11 August 2011
This convoluted rapscallion debacle seems to fancy itself a horror/comedy of sorts. Now, I've seen my fair share of flicks in this particular subgenre, and EVIL IN THE WOODS exhibits nothing in consuetude with any of them...or with movies in general, for that matter.

The twisted corpus of this cinemerde royale concerns a little boy checking out a book called EVIL IN THE WOODS from his local library, and reading from it a fractured fairytale about a group of filmmakers confronting...well...evil in the woods. And just what is "the evil", you might ask? Um...that might include some folks in janky rubber trick-or-treat masks, a dimestore Sasquatch, an alien, and a witch who lives in a deep-forest tumbledown shack(which has a curiously out-of-place modern refrigerator). Also inclusive to this anarchic salmagundi are a couple of midgets and a narrator who talks like Gomer Pyle, intermittently dictating the text of screencards for, presumably, the blind and subliterate.

A migraine-inducing backyard home-movie which is so structurally distempered that it might actually appeal to a select few on some freakish, OMG*WTF level.

2/10. Beyond bad...beyond bizarre...beyond belief.
3 out of 8 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
1/10
Nonsense with a schizophrenic pace and tone.
timber-3010812 April 2024
Warning: Spoilers
A little turd checks a book out of the library in a poor attempt to Neverending Story himself, I think. He starts reading a book about a low budget horror film production in a small Georgia town called Mildew that's been evil for 3300 years.

I'm still not sure what I just watched. The plot was nonsense, the editing was seemingly random, the acting and dialogue were both awful and the tone was jumping all over the place. It seemed to be going for campy horror comedy for about the first 3/4ths then took a hard turn into straight gory horror.

My notes from watching this look like a schizophrenic's attempt at an outline for a horror story. You start with the little kid checking out the book with the movie's title and heading home to read it. He spends the rest of the movie in his bedroom with an awesome Star Wars bed set reading said book and breaking the 4th wall by talking to the narrator.

The story begins with a family arriving in Mildew and heading out for a camping trip. There are silent film style black screens with text and a goofy narrator to bridge transitions to the other group. We see a scene being shot by the film crew then jump back to the family setting up camp and the son (Billy) wanders off into the woods finding a little girl jump roping who leads him to her weirdo family. Those weirdos then take Billy to an old witch who lives in a shack in the woods. We cut to Billy's parents driving to the sheriff's office and his father trying to claim everything will be okay and the sheriff is already on it.

When they arrive the sheriff had been napping but wakes up just before they arrive. He informs them of the old witch but says he is busy until the next day so they should just hold off on the search until the morning. Not accepting that they get the witch's address from him and head there themselves. They meet and have tea with her. She assures them that Billy will be fine and they should come back in the morning to her and they'll search together. They seem to think that's perfectly reasonable and head back to get some sleep.

That only gets us about 20 minutes into the plot and I'm not doing that for the rest. You've got 3 plots going on at once but the main one doesn't really get going until all that crap happens. The film crew are picked off or go disappearing one by one and that old witch uses her spells to turn the weirdos into monsters. The kid reading the book disappears for the back half of the movie but shows back up at the very end.

This was ultra low budget but still shot on film. It has the feel of an early 90s shot on video production. The monster makeup is surprisingly good at times but that's the only positive I can give this. William J. Oats wrote, directed and produced this turd but he was wise enough to not star in it and just had an extended cameo and was killed off early. Not surprisingly, those are his only credits listed online.

Don't watch this, it tries to be funny but the only thing I laughed at was the nonsensical editing. It tries to be atmospheric and creepy while the editing and terrible sound mixing ruin that at every turn. I wasted 90 minutes of my life watching and another 30 writing this about this, don't be like me. Shame on you MassacreVideo, this could have decayed on magnetic tape and film stock but now it's digitized forever.
0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
6/10
Very nice ultra low-budget
Walle-26 March 1999
This is probably the movie with the lowest budget ever made. But that what makes it so cool. The actors are...what can I say? Not that good, but that is just why I like it. You can really feel the bad acting thru the screen in to your bones. For most of the actors this is the only thing they´ve done (and I understand why). But it is funny and different and I actually recommend it to everyone that´s not so hung up on famous movies with good actors. I prefer this one instead of all those "mega" budget movies. Evil In The Woods gets a 8/10 in points
12 out of 20 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

See also

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews


Recently Viewed