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Credits

Director: Marty Weiss Starring: Ryan Merriman, Haylie Duff, Danny Nucci, Mark Rolston Screenplay: Anthony Jaswinski Country: USA

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These people certainly should have…

A group of eight young corporate go-getters have ventured to a remote wilderness location for a team building exercise (no, I haven't accidentally started giving you the synopsis for Severence, just in case you are wondering). The game of choice is paintball, while the aim of the game is to impress upper management by showing skill and determination, and with an extra weeks pay going to the victor everyone is keen to give it a red-hot go. Unfortunately however, not long after the first paint balls have been fired the jolly corporate jaunt turns into a desperate fight for survival when the game spills into the pissing grounds of an unsociable backwoods religious cult whose members don't take too kindly to big city folk, and are always on the lookout for new female recruits to impregnate…

It took less than ten minutes to figure out where Backwoods was going, because essentially every backwoods horror movie tells the same story – people go into the woods, people get chased, people get dead, survivors eventually fight back. So the question is, will the same old story be told with any style here? Sadly, in the case of Backwoods, the answer is no. One of the things that makes the backwoods horror genre so interesting is not it's originality, but it's brutal tone – seeing normal folks like you and I in an unfamiliar environment, suffering unthinkable torment, before their most primitive survival instincts kick-in and they themselves become as savage as their attackers. Backwoods horror is often grim, gritty, and realistic, but Backwoods feels like a candy coated backwoods flick made for teenagers.

Considering its made for cable origins there's nothing particularly b-grade about Backwoods, with the production values on par with some of the lower budgeted stuff coming from the major studios. The cast, for the most part, are likeable too, adding depth to an assortment of office stereotypes from nice guy Ryan Merriman (previously seen dodging death in Final Destination 3) to the office sweetheart Haylie Duff (sister of the more famous Hilary) who struts around the woods in knee high boots, which is not an appropriate fashion choice, but one that is pleasing to the eye nonetheless. On the backwoods killer side Robert Allen Mukes looks suitably fearsome as the hulking family stud who seeks to take the comely office lasses against their will for much of Backwoods' second half, and fans of cult cinema should get a kick out of seeing Deborah Van Valkenburgh from The Warriors playing the twisted family matriarch.

Solid the cast may be, but the backwoods genre isn't one that necessarily needs a good cast – it needs to do mean and nasty things to good people. It needs blood, guts, and white knuckle tension, but Backwoods isn't nearly exploitative enough. Now I'm perfectly capable of enjoying movies that aren't all about the violence and gore, and Backwoods' lack of nastiness might not have been a problem if it weren't for the fact that it looked like it was trying to be nasty at times. In the second act, after the obligatory woodsy chase scenes, it slips into Hostel territory with the characters being battered and beaten in seedy industrial looking basements, and much of the final act shows the young female office workers tied to beds with an ever present threat of sexual violence in the air, but these scenes, which should be exploitive, come across as very tame. The OFLC warning on the front of the slick claims the movie features "Frequent Strong Violence", but I think our local censors need to harden up and give us their consumer advice from a more manlier perspective, as the violence was neither frequent nor strong.