What was obviously meant to be an interesting twist on the psycho-killer-vs-girls-in-the-woods genre turned out to be an amateurish, hackneyed thriller that will likely leave you feeling guilty for having invested your time in it.
Good-looking Charisma brings her whiny, mouse-faced friend Allison to her hometown of Green River, hoping to put to rest her trauma over having lost her sister to a cult that has caused the disappearance of many local women.
The supposed cult is the MacGuffin here, as it really only serves as a motivator for what should have been a psychological character study, but is actually a dopey bore.
Out on a nature hike, Allison loses a little tin of what apparently are anti-homicidal-maniac pills (they make those?), because just a few minutes later, she begins to act maniacally homicidal.
Soon, she leaps to the conclusion that the local fish and game warden is actually the killer of all those missing women. So, she runs him down with his own truck, shoots him twice and sends him floating down what I would assume is the eponymous river before the two girls drag him back to his own cabin and tie him up.
There, he remains taunted and tormented by Allison while Charisma goes for help. But Charisma gets lost in the woods. In what may be the most incoherent scene in an already confused and rambling movie, Charisma begins to hear the ghostly voices of children for no reason at all. The voices are never explained, or ever referred to again.
Meanwhile, the punishment the old man takes at the hands of Allison is almost comical. She puts a gun to his head, insults him, teases him sexually, even threatens to cut his privates off.
What was the director thinking? That the audience is at the edge of its seat at this moment, whispering breathlessly to themselves, "God, I wonder of the fish and game warden is going to make it? Please, let the fish and game warden make it!" In reality, the viewer won't give the schmutz between their ballsack and inner thigh if the fish and game warden makes it or not. We're never given reason to care about him as a character, or the girls either, for that matter.
And in at least that area, that's not the writer's fault. Everything else is, but not that. Every actor in the film turns in such a uniformly bad and careless performance, it's like they were pulled straight from a college video project, handed the "Green River" script and told to get in front of the camera the same day. They don't care, so we don't care, either.
Oh, and there's a twist ending. But it will come as a surprise only to those people who read the back of the Cocoa Puffs box and are surprised to learn it contains no actual cocoa.
If you read my other reviews on this site you'll see I'm rather forgiving of even the worst direct-to-DVD nonsense, but "Green River" was a chore to sit through, even for me. Send this one down the river, folks.
Good-looking Charisma brings her whiny, mouse-faced friend Allison to her hometown of Green River, hoping to put to rest her trauma over having lost her sister to a cult that has caused the disappearance of many local women.
The supposed cult is the MacGuffin here, as it really only serves as a motivator for what should have been a psychological character study, but is actually a dopey bore.
Out on a nature hike, Allison loses a little tin of what apparently are anti-homicidal-maniac pills (they make those?), because just a few minutes later, she begins to act maniacally homicidal.
Soon, she leaps to the conclusion that the local fish and game warden is actually the killer of all those missing women. So, she runs him down with his own truck, shoots him twice and sends him floating down what I would assume is the eponymous river before the two girls drag him back to his own cabin and tie him up.
There, he remains taunted and tormented by Allison while Charisma goes for help. But Charisma gets lost in the woods. In what may be the most incoherent scene in an already confused and rambling movie, Charisma begins to hear the ghostly voices of children for no reason at all. The voices are never explained, or ever referred to again.
Meanwhile, the punishment the old man takes at the hands of Allison is almost comical. She puts a gun to his head, insults him, teases him sexually, even threatens to cut his privates off.
What was the director thinking? That the audience is at the edge of its seat at this moment, whispering breathlessly to themselves, "God, I wonder of the fish and game warden is going to make it? Please, let the fish and game warden make it!" In reality, the viewer won't give the schmutz between their ballsack and inner thigh if the fish and game warden makes it or not. We're never given reason to care about him as a character, or the girls either, for that matter.
And in at least that area, that's not the writer's fault. Everything else is, but not that. Every actor in the film turns in such a uniformly bad and careless performance, it's like they were pulled straight from a college video project, handed the "Green River" script and told to get in front of the camera the same day. They don't care, so we don't care, either.
Oh, and there's a twist ending. But it will come as a surprise only to those people who read the back of the Cocoa Puffs box and are surprised to learn it contains no actual cocoa.
If you read my other reviews on this site you'll see I'm rather forgiving of even the worst direct-to-DVD nonsense, but "Green River" was a chore to sit through, even for me. Send this one down the river, folks.
