IN THE WOODS
dir. Lynn Drzick, 1999
USA. 81 min.
In English.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10 – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 10PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20 – 7:30PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 10PM
Vengeance is timeless.
A grieving firefighter and his hunting buddy dig up a mysterious grave in the woods and unleash a horned creature with a very long memory.
Shot on a $252,000 budget and hurled into video stores just before the millennium, IN THE WOODS is the kind of shot-on-Beta, blood-soaked DIY monster movie that only exists because somebody in Kalamazoo, Michigan really wanted it to. DJ Perry (of Knight Chills fame) stars as Alex Kerwood, a fireman haunted by a mother and baby he couldn’t save, whose grief drives a wedge straight through his marriage. Naturally, the solution is a hunting trip with his buddy Wayne, deep into some very unlucky woods, where things quickly spiral when they stumble on, and dig up, a grave with a three-horned skull in it.
Writer/director Lynn Drzick throws practical monster effects, backwoods folklore, and soap-opera marital strife into a big pot and lets it simmer. The results are gnarly, sincere, and completely unconcerned with things like pacing or plausibility. Drzick, a Kalamazoo native, shot the whole thing on his home turf, roping in local landmarks like Henderson Castle and the now-shuttered Portage Pub, and even got the actual Portage Fire Department to set off real explosions for the film’s more volatile scenes.
This is the platonic ideal of a regional creature feature: a film made by people who clearly loved the genre, bankrolled just enough to actually build a monster suit, and abandoned by history until a recent Blu-ray resurrection dragged it back from the void of long-lost Beta SP masters.
We’re screening Drzick’s newly recut director’s edition, restored and expanded straight from that resurrected master with extra monster footage spliced back in — because if there’s one thing this movie needed more of, it’s the guy in the horn suit.
This Spectober, come dig up something you shouldn’t.