Rating: D-
Dir: Demetrious Donnell Edwards
Star: Demetrious Donnell Edwards, Dexter Smith, Kayla Hernandez, Brandon Davis
Part of me was reluctant to give this such a poor grade, until I looked at the maker’s IMDb page, and saw that this was one of six films he made in 2024. I’m not certain all are features, since the IMDb pages are incredibly bare-bones: but based on the running times there, at least two (and possibly more) are. To be honest: he should therefore know better. Because this stumbles from falling into one pitfall of low-budget cinema to the next, as if it were Wile E. Coyote. It begins somewhat promisingly, with Demon Hamilton (Edwards), a criminal fleeing a robbery, getting into a crash and finding himself stuck in a weird forest.
Thereafter… Well, I’m not prepared to bet my house on any of this, but as far as I can tell: he gets possessed by the spirit of a medicine man, and starts killing anyone else unfortunate to wander into these “Wasted Woods”. Which would be, for the most part, the members of a family camping trip, who seem thoroughly unprepared for the entire outdoor experience, never mind a guy in a mask with a machete. Basically, what this movie comprises is:
- 10 minutes of Hamilton wandering around, talking to himself
- 35 minutes of the family wandering around, yelling over the top of each other, and occasionally being picked off in bloodless and underwhelming ways.
- 5 minutes of someone contacting a medium on the outside, who leaves them a message explaining how to kill Hamilton. This may be the only time a telephone psychic has been of use. However, we discover the medicine man was Geronimo, and according to the medium, was Mexican. Excuse me, I have the Apache nation holding on line one for Mr. Edwards..
- 25 more minutes of family wandering, yelling, and bloodless kills
- 3 minutes of them executing the psychic’s instructions
- Roll end credits.
In other words, it’s almost all wandering and yelling. It genuinely does not feel like there was an actual script here, with it frequently being impossible to tell what was being said, because it’s all overlapping. We learn literally nothing about the characters: I wouldn’t have known anybody’s name, if I hadn’t left the subtitles on from the last movie I watched. There’s only two moments of note: one when someone questions the whole idea, because camping is what white people do (the cast here is 100% black); and the other, where someone refuses to leave his cooler behind, proudly pronouncing he’s an alcoholic.
For someone with so many credits, it’s startling how borderline incompetent this it. Consecutive shots will go from broad daylight to the dead of night, or there’s random footage, like a shot of an extremely large (and admittedly, impressive) snake slithering across a road. This jumps from the middle of the woods, to a bodega in an urban park or a suburban cul-de-sac with no coherence, and is accompanied either by bad rap music, or a selection from Halloween Music Vol. 4. Hard to say which is more irritating. Not the worst film I’ve seen this year. Likely ranked, however.