Review of The Backwoods (2006) by Billy B — 07 Dec 2009

Predictable. The film is "Wrong Turn 2" meets "The Hills Have Eyes 2". The women are kept for breeding, it's in the woods, and there are fucked up mutants waiting to kill you. From minute one you could tell who the survivors were gonna be, and what the love triangle between the characters is. The deaths weren't decent enough to satisfy my taste, and the cliche's took us on an endless ride of predictability and boredom. The ending was seen a mile away, as majority of these backwoods (excuse the pun) type horror's all end with a villian being alive somehow. You will probably enjoy this film if your not really paying close attention and doing something at the same time, and it takes a while to actually get into the horror part of the story.

The plot in my opinion is the film child of "Wrong Turn 2" and "The Hills Have Eyes 2". Theres mutants, women are kept for breeding, and it's in a secluded place without a mobile signal (sound familiar?). The only thing that this film didn't have that it's parents (...) had was cannibalism, which would've made it alot more enjoyable. There wasn't enough blood and gore, and it looked fake anyway, but what was really stupid was we got to know only four characters intimately, the other four were just there to fill time.

The acting was nothing special. "Hilary Duff" isn't much of an actress herself, and when her older, less attractive sister "Haylie" stars in a film she's alot worse. No wonder she only gets roles in low-budget direct-to-DVD films, because she was just all over the place in her emotion and expressions (Maybe she could take a page from Lindsay Lohans book of excellency). There was however an exception to the cheap and trashy cast, one that has the skills to be a lead in a theatrical film (Final Destination 3). "Ryan Merriman" was the younger of the group of colleagues, and was caught in the love triangle with the "Duff" sister. He excelled in being the hero, and although wasn't as great as in his previous horror flicks (The Ring, FD3) he still managed to pull off the realisticness and believability the film really need to propel it from "trashy piece of shit" to "mediocre and watchable".

Overall "Backwoods" is too predictable, has a really bad cast and isn't as gorey as you would hope from it's sub-genre. My rating is 2/5.