The box for Eyes of the Woods boasts that it is in the “tradition of The Evil Dead and Jeepers Creepers.” I can safely say that the similarities between these movies end at “death in a wooded area.” There are good-bad horror movies, there are funny-bad horror movies, and then there’s just bad-bad horror movies, and unfortunately Eyes of the Woods falls in to the later.
The movie begins in that Earlybird filter available on Instagram. It’s in the 1600s, I think. In America, I guess. There’s a board on a wall displaying this information but I can’t read the font.
A bunch of people are crying. At first I think they’re re-enacting the first Thanksgiving dinner, but no. These are the legitimate costumes for 1600s America.
Also present in this little New England (I think) village is a priest wearing a British Parliament judge wig, a Middle Ages friar, and a gold prospector from the 1840s.
Everyone is gathering because a young girl in the village just died. Men are crying, ladies are wailing, etc. The priest in the wig goes to comfort an upset man we learn is Christopher Wicker, the father of the young girl. Wicker is apparently a Christian scientist, because he rails against the priest for trying to pray for his daughter’s health instead of using medicine. The priest is all like, “Dude, we don’t have that much medicine and she was pretty dead anyway.” Wicker is like, “Fuck you, man.”
And then sells his soul to Satan.
It’s a pretty big jump, especially when his reasons for dealing with the devil are to get revenge on the villagefolk for…..? Watching his little girl get sick and die? Pretty sure you did the same thing, Wicker. Because it’s the 1600s. Most people didn’t live past the age of 30. Even the Yosemite Sam guy is probably only 16-years old. But whatever, you already got those pentagrams carved into your palms, so why not go all the way with it.
So he makes his deal with the devil by cutting off his finger in a pentagram and making an inverted cross on his stomach with blood and his happy trail. But it all goes wrong, and then Wicker becomes the devil. Or just a monster. It’s kind of hard to tell with the extremely red filter.
He makes his way through the little pilgrim village, killing them and eating them. It’s not even very gruesome. Most of the deaths occur with that Jaws-cam where the camera is the monster, so it’s just a lot of scared pilgrims screaming at you. None of the deaths are even that original, except maybe the friar who gets his head split open like a coconut. At one point he slits the throat of a pilgrim woman, rips off her top while she’s gargling on her own blood, and screams at her exposed breasts.
Now it’s present day, which is a pretty sketchy notion, because this movie was made in 2009 but these people are dressed like they’re modeling for a Sears catalogue in 1999. They are all your typical horror movie characters: the Nice Guy driving the van, the Goth Girl who’s as high as a kite they apparently trust to give directions without a map, the Smart Girl wearing glasses and reading a book, the Pretty Girl who inherited her father’s Navy Seal knowledge through genetics, and the combination Jerkass/Funny Guy who says things like, “We should have taken my Suburban with all Eddie Bauer interior.”
These “kids” are going someplace, it’s not clear, but they let the stoned Goth Girl give the directions, and end up in the woods with their car mysteriously dead in a way that’s never explained. They decide to camp for the night.
Now, I accept these kinds of mistakes in older horror movies, like Friday the 13th and Evil Dead, because the kids in those movies have never seen Friday the 13th and Evil Dead. They have no knowledge of the typical horror movie set-ups and so don’t know what to expect. This group has cell phones and enough awareness to not set their camp up miles from their broken van and the road. They have no excuses for being this un-savvy towards their genre. People in old horror movies are ignorant to what could happen, and therefore cannot be blamed. Filmmakers need to update their stories to reflect the times they’re in and stop trying to recreate what only worked in the past.
The rest of the movie could basically just be retitled “Montage of People Having a Shitty Time in the Woods”. Goth Girl goes missing on the first night, following what she thinks is an innocent little girl, but is actually the dead daughter of the Wicker demon. She keeps calling this little girl “Sweetie.”
They go out looking for the Goth Girl, and then forget about it for a while. Seriously, it’s like these people have short-term memory loss, because they stumble around the woods for four days, and only occasionally remember to call out this girl’s name. The Wicker demon is no better, really. You’re the devil, how hard is it to eat five idiots in a dark forest?
There is also a brief introduction to an unnamed couple who are instantly more appealing than the other five. They smoke under a tree for a bit, and then are interrupted by another unnamed naked girl covered in blood. Then they are all eaten.
The nudity in the scene pissed me off a whole lot. There’s no explanation for who this girl is or what was done to her, but one can assume she was eating a hamburger with too much ketchup and she’s a really messy eater. Or she was kidnapped by the Wicker demon, I guess. But if that’s the case, why did he leave on her panties? What’s the point in taking off her top, defiling her enough to leave her stumbling and dazed and covered in blood, and then putting her underwear back on? Weak. Go big or go home.
So there’s a lot of them stumbling around the woods for four days, and they get separated of course. Nice Guy falls into a giant puddle filled with bones and then gets eaten by a corpse. Jerkass/Funny Guy talks to himself for the rest of the movie, promptly forgetting there was anyone there with him.
Really, nothing more important happens in this movie. It’s kind of boring, except when the Wicker demon shows up and even then you barely get to see him murderin’. We see the camera zooming in on people screaming, and then half the time the people are fine in the next scene, with no explanation as to how they were saved. There is a lot of time spent asking stupid questions, which is actually kind of meta, and the girls suddenly stripping down to their underwear, which is kind of predictable.
Finally, on day four, the Pretty Girl shouts, “I will not be food for this thing!” Cue Wicker demon standing right behind them.
The rest of this movie becomes an acid trip. Or maybe I took acid around this point. There’s literally no way to be sure. At one point the Smart Girl dies, and then the Pretty Girl beheads the Wicker demon with a tree branch.
I can’t believe no one thought of that in the entire 400 years he was out there.
The Pretty Girl becomes the Final Girl. Unfortunately for her, she stumbled off the set of Eyes of the Woods and on to The Ring.
This turns out to be the Goth Girl, who also made a deal with the devil, which is pretty typical for a Goth girl.
But that’s not the real ending. The credits roll for a second, and then another title card comes up saying “two weeks later.” It’s in the woods, and it’s rich Jerkass/Funny guy, who in 14 days has become Mountain Rambo Guy with a beer belly. Using the two tricks Pretty Girl with Navy Seal dad taught him – how to tell the time with your fists and how to tell if berries are poisonous – newly christened Mountain Rambo Guy barrel rolls his way off screen.
Eyes of the Woods is a clusterfuck, but not a particularly exciting one. It’s not an original movie. It’s an exhausted story that’s been told in far better ways. The acting was weird and stilted – like the actors thought there was a certain kind of expectation they had to live up to when working on a C-rated horror movie and didn’t try to rise above it. The production value was next to none, and you could make an entire movie out of the plot holes this thing had. It felt like no one involved actually tried to create something good, and watching it just made me feel tired.
I give it two skulls out of five for a good song during the end credits and the moment where the Smart Girl tries to run away and knocks herself out with a tree, and now I’m just going to watch The Evil Dead. Hail to the king, baby.
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