She Came from the Woods

There's a fine line between an homage and an imitation.  She Came from the Woods wants to be an homage to all those 1980s Summer Camp slasher films with a comedic bent, but it never rises above being anything but a pale imitation.  It knows the words, but not the music.

The movie is in the tradition of what Roger Ebert used to call a "Dead Teenager Film", where the plot revolves around a bunch of kids being alive at the start of the film, and most of them being dead by the end of it.  Director Erik Bloomquist (who co-wrote the screenplay with Carter Bloomquist) has studied the material well, and he actually gets some better performances out of his cast than you might expect.  But, the movie doesn't build, and doesn't have the manic energy you would expect.  There are a few cute moments.  I like how when before one of the hornier camp counselors dies, he musters the last bit of strength he has in order to feel the breast of one of the women nearby.  I smiled at that, but never truly laughed.  The movie also meanders and takes too long to set up the bloodshed and carnage which, let's face it, is what the audience is here for.

Like the movies it draws inspiration from, the film is set at a family-owned summer camp that has a dark history behind its sunny facade.  In this case, the camp's resident ghoul is Nurse Agatha, a deranged woman who stole blood from the children at the camp, kept them in jars, and hung them from trees in order to perform some sort of ritual that would give her eternal life, even after death.  The young teens who work at the camp decide to summon the spirit of Agatha, not knowing that it would actually work, and now they're all in danger as they're picked off one by one.  As is tradition with these movies, the young cast is made up of hopefuls who are probably hoping this leads to bigger and better things.  This has happened, as one of Kevin Bacon's early performances was in Friday the 13th, while Johnny Depp had his big break with the original A Nightmare on Elm Street.

All of this plays out exactly as it should, which is what makes She Came from the Woods an imitation, rather than an homage.  The movie never finds a fresh spin on this material, and is content to just follow what came before.  Occasionally, it falls upon a fun idea that got my hopes up.  At one point, the spirit of the evil Agatha possesses a small group of the children at the camp to turn into violent little savages.  My mind immediately sprung to a lot of dark and fun ideas the film could have with this concept.  I especially like how one of the little demon children walks with crutches, and kept on waiting for the movie to do something funny with this idea, but it never does.  It's content to play by the rules, rather than adding some of its own or truly going wild.

For what is obviously a low budget project, the movie does at least look good, and the cast know what kind of movie they're in, and deliver.  I simply found nothing here that caused more than just a slight smile now and then.  I wanted to like this, and was ready for a good time, but the movie just kept on showing me what I had already seen before, only with better gore effects than the ones from 40 years ago.

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