Evil In The Woods (1986)Somebody must have said once that 'if we only had a little money we could make a low budget movie about making a low budget movie'. Okay, nobody probably said that, for good reason. This is even worse. This is a low budget movie about a boy reading a book about people making a low budget movie. If you want to stop here, I can't really blame you.
We have a Georgia setting where a little boy goes to the city library, finds an old book called 'Evil In The Woods' in the children's section (How come they didn't have cool stuff like that when I was little?), checks it out, then takes it home to his home in (The suburbs? The country? It was awful rural looking for a kid who was in the middle of a large city just a few moments before). We have some never-explained happenings of noises in the closet which quiets when Billy (Brian Abent in probably his first and last role) gets his milk and cookies and lays on his bed to read. Right now you're thinking 'Okay, this is a Neverending Story type of thing, right?' Sort of. I wish. I really REALLY wish. An unnamed person called this the "weirdest movie on the planet". That was NOT a compliment.
The book, 'Another fractured fable by the fantasy factory' is huge and since there wasn't enough budget for a continuity person (if there way he/she should never work again) each scene the boy is seen with the book it is in a different place. As Billy reads, a narrator's voice pipes up in a backwoods southern drawl (the boy asks "Who is that?" "I'm the narrator." "Oh.") and starts to read it for him. Ich. We not only have the narration through the whole movie-within-a-movie but also old time storyboards to push the plot along. Yikes. As far as ideas go, the makers of this film had a whole lot of them. Unfortunately, none of them were good.
It gets really murky from here - we have references to a town called Mildew with a 3,030 year old evil (never explained), a witch who is old and ugly during the day, an 80's type slut at night (never explained) a production company filming a sasquatch vs. aliens type movie (never explained but you don't want them to anyway), a family who lose their son in the woods (same kid reading the book but you don't care) who never find him, a troupe of backwoods... uhhh.. calling them weirdos seems to be insulting to weirdos. It's like they went to Goodwill, told each one to pick random crap out of bins and throw it on. Oh, and babble because they don't really speak. Did I mention that they were also the witch's children and all are cannibals? No? Probably because by now you're so confused (or bored) you're just waiting for the end to come. Sorry, this movie is 90 minutes long, although it seems four times that long.Let's not get into any more of the gut wrenching piece of film, just go for the ending: the witch uses voodoo dolls (also not explained) to apparently turn her little weirdos into real monsters who then butcher everybody left to butcher. How? Why? We don't care, we really REALLY don't. Cut away to Billy on his bed, reading the back cover 'Please watch for other fractured fables by fantasy factory'. Oh God please no. Since this was 1986, I think we're safe. Billy's parents (absent through the film) come in and tell him they're going camping and take the book from him. Billy then transforms into a monster and the shaking closet opens to a liquified monster (nothing explained) which then, we have to assume this because they don't have the budget to show it, butchers the parents. The last we see is Eddie on an Iron Maiden poster as this abortion of a movie comes to a sigh-of-relief close.
If I were Iron Maiden, I'd have sued those suckers for putting that poster in there. Yikes. Please please only watch this movie if you want to see just how much your duh tolerance is, or you're contemplating ending your life and want to see something horrible to convince you to do it.
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