Backwoods

Directed by: Dean Crow
Starring: Christina Noonan, Jack O'Hara, Brad Armacost and Dick Kreusser

Karen: You just saved a life, you got blood all over your hands, and you still have chicken heads on the brain?
Jaime: Yeah, well there were chicken heads from here, all the way to where we parked the bikes.
Karen: Well… maybe that’s how people find their way home around here.

Karen (Christina Noonan) and boyfriend Jaime (Brad Armacost) decide to spend the night camping in the woods. Actually, Karen decides and convinces her pansy-ass boyfriend to come along. It’ll take you about 3 minutes before you get your fill of this guy’s bitching & moaning. Unfortunately, since he’s one of the two main characters, we’re stuck with him. Anyway, these two go camping & Jaime keeps finding chicken heads lying around. At first he doesn’t think anything about it, but we know it can only mean one thing… a GEEK! In this case, William, the Geek (Jack O’Hara), although we don’t find that out until later. (That last sentence was a spoiler, don’t read it if you don’t want to spoil this movie.) Unfortunately, we must first sit through a dozen or so awkward attempts a poultry humor. Stick with it, things get better. While camping, the couple is spied on by an unseen stalker, complete with Friday the 13th style StalkerVision™.

Soon Karen & Jaime (who happens to be a doctor) help an injured girl they find lying in the middle of the trail. They meet the girl’s deeply-redneck father Eben (Dick Kreusser), who invites them back to his cabin for some vittles. Of course, they accept this offer, despite the fact that Eben looks and sounds like the inspiration for Billy Bob Thorton’s Sling Blade character. Over dinner, we find out that Eben also has a son William who ‘isn’t quite right.’ Turns out, William was attacked by a dog at a young age, and the head injuries from that attack left him as (quite literally) a drooling idiot. Check that… a drooling idiot who likes to bite the heads off small animals. Obviously, its William that’s been stalking our duo. Over the next 30 minutes or so Karen tries to make friends with William (by treating him like a human) and Jaime tries to make friends with Eben (by drinking moonshine and going coon-hunting). Predictably, neither attempt at friendship ends up with much success. When William puts Jamie out of commission, Karen kicks into revenge mode. This leads to a pretty sweet confrontation between the two, complete with a make-shift fish-hook barbed wire net & a stick of dynamite disguised to look a lot like a certain small animal. The film then wraps up with a somewhat surprising twist, and a final still-frame dictionary definition of Geek, which, if you think about it, would have been much more helpful at the beginning of the movie.

Like a lot of cheap 80’s horror, Backwoods starts off kinda slow, and has at least one main character that’s nails-on-chalkboard annoying. Surprisingly however, Backwoods also has a really good actor in Dick Kreusser. He has several monologues that serve to both creep you out, and genuinely make you feel bad for the guy and his two kids.

According to IMDB, Kreusser’s only other roles were a Wino in 1987’s Twice Under, and as Sgt. Colin McNair in 2001’s The Greatest Adventure of My Life. Not exactly a stellar filmography, but hell, he’s as good as Billy Bob, if not better, and Billy Bob almost won an Oscar for it. Bottom line, this movie has at least a few redeeming qualities, which is enough to merit a viewing in my book.


Micah

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