#james bryan

BTS Bridgerton Season 4

Why didn’t the people responsible for James Bryan’s DON’T GO IN THE WOODS (1981, Shudder, AMC+, Tubi, Plex, YouTube) heed the title? They might have saved me 82 minutes of horror at the thought sentient beings made something this craptacular. Of course, had I checked the director’s credits and discovered his previous film was the equally inept LADY STREET FIGHTER (1980), with the immortal line “Shut up and talk,” I’d have done something more enlightening, like cleaning the cat box or trying to diagram one of Trump’s sentences. There may be one or two ideas lurking in this attempt to cash in on the slasher craze, and the Utah scenery is pretty, but it’s the kind of film where the landscape is more expressive than the actors.

A deranged killer is stalking the woods outside Park City. The film opens with a woman running for her life. Then, the the script forgets about her and follows a bird watcher who gets himself murdered, possibly because he’s a grown man dressed up as if he were a cub scout. At some point we move to the main characters, three young people out camping with a more experienced forester, not that that protects him. Of course, he can’t be all that good at his job. He tells them they’ll only sleep in the open one night and then can’t find the cabin where they’re supposed to vacation. And his idea of fun is tying up one of the female campers in her sleeping bag and hanging it from a tree limb. As the group treks endlessly through the woods in search of that mythical cabin, other people keep popping up to be murdered, including a woman who manages to turn her husband’s name, “Dale,” into a two-syllable word. She, too, ends up day-ed. There are so many people in this stretch of woodland it’s a marvel they aren’t constantly bumping into each other. Eventually the killer gets around to the campers. Meanwhile, the sheriff sends a posse out to hunt for the killer, warns them not to venture off alone and then, you guessed it, ventures off alone. There’s also a man in a wheelchair desperately trying to roll himself through the woods as some kind of tribute to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) that nobody needed.

The film consistently forgets people and is filled with actors so bad the only way they’d come near an Oscar would be in a bit part as an actor accepting one. In fact, leading man Nick Cleland would pop up 39 years later, in only his third credit, playing Edmund Gwenn in the final episode of Ryan Murphy’s HOLLYWOOD. At least when he made this film, he had a half-decent torso.