Rating: D
Dir: Ryan Callaway
Star: Melissa Malone, Madeline Lupi, Carmine Giordano, Nate Gray
It begins to feel like there’s a certain point where watching a Callaway film is a self-inflicted injury. Neither Let’s Not Meet nor the imaginatively-titled follow-up, Let’s Not Meet in the Woods, were up to much. Yet, somehow, here we are. This is an earlier entry in the Callaway filmography, which I see has now reached nineteen features, with another two in the pipeline. As ever, I will begin by acknowledging this is nineteen more features than I am ever likely to direct. I also want to go on the record that there has been some improvement over time. One of the problems with LNM was its 114-minute running time. Wrath, made the previous year, runs eleven minutes longer.
Make no mistake, the writing is the worst (though not the only) problem here. It feels like there were three separate scripts here, which got mixed in together, following an unfortunate collating incident at Kinko’s, before Callaway said, “Fuck it” and made a movie out of them anyway. We get a heartwarming family drama about caring for a disabled child; a tense thriller about a masked vigilante putting his targets under siege; and a slice of home-invasion horror. These do not sit well with each other. Any two would be tough to combine. Three, and the result becomes a bit of a tonal roller-coaster. And it’s the one from Final Destination 3.
In short, Rain (Malone) and husband Dash (Giordano) are the parents in question, part of a crew who go on what’s supposed to be a simple burglary, under Red (Gray). Only it isn’t: they find themselves being attacked in the woods nearby, and end up having to take refuge in a house occupied by 12-year-old Three (Lupi), who has been left there by her mother. Any time the thieves try to escape, they are driven back into the house, getting increasingly panicky as a result. It’s all confusing, and in desperate need of simplification. We don’t even need to see Rain’s daughter. The scenes of her doing physical therapy add absolutely nothing to maternal motivation, which could have been as effectively put over in one well-written scene of dialogue between Rain and Three.
The execution is no great shakes either, with things like a supposedly “slit throat” resulting in an amount of blood more appropriate to a mid-strength nose bleed. The actions of the thieves make no sense, whipping their masks off at a moment’s notice – what was the point of wearing them to begin with? The vigilante side of things might be the most potentially interesting, yet gets the least amount of screen time, largely discarded until the very end – by which point I wouldn’t blame you if you had ceased giving a damn. If this had known its limitations, and been half the actual length, it might have been bearable. Instead, it’s the poster child for diminishing returns, collapsing from tolerable micro-budget shenanigans into a test of endurance.