BACKWOODS

Directed by Dean Crow. 1988. United States.

BACKWOODS has been living on an external hard drive full of VHS rips for a very long time. I can even tell you the exact date I added it to the drive. April 13, 2013, or at least that’s what file properties tell me. It might have even been around longer than that, sitting on my old laptop, waiting to be watched, before I moved it over to the external drive and forgot it existed. I don’t know if I downloaded it from Cinemageddon or Demonoid, but I do know that wherever I grabbed it from, the uploader had labeled it as a “slasher”. I know that because I put an (S) at the end of the file name.

That’s why I was confused when I spotted it sitting there, untouched after all those years. My first instinct upon getting my hands on an '80s slasher is to watch it, not to let it sit and collect dust. How could this have slipped through my fingers? How could I have neglected it for this long? This could potentially be great, or as great as an ‘80s slasher that never made off of VHS could be. But let’s be honest, it wasn’t going to be great. Great movies don’t disappear like BACKWOODS, forever relegated to VHS rips on file-sharing sites for weirdos and perverts. No, this was probably just another miserable, boring slasher snoozefest.

So imagine my surprise when I finally watched BACKWOODS and found out that it’s not even a slasher movie. At least, I wouldn’t consider it a slasher film. No, it’s something more akin to Don Gronquist 1982 Video Nasty UNHINGED. But, Dave, you say, isn’t that a slasher movie? Again, no. I don’t think it is. I mean, people are murdered in that film, but when you put UNHINGED next to virtually any other slasher movie, it doesn’t bear much of a resemblance. It’s too slow, too mundane, too concerned with long stretches of conversation and mood building. Were it made post-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, it would be a film people would call a psychological thriller. It’s clearly attempting to do something different than your typical bit of blood pornography.

BACKWOODS has only half the murders UNHINGED has, and practically no interest in anything close to mood or atmosphere. There’s barely a story here. Jaime and Karen are biking across Kentucky. He’s a doctor and she’s something or another. I don’t think we ever find out what Karen does for a living. They set up camp in the middle of the woods. Jaime keeps tripping over the headless bodies of chickens everywhere he goes. When the couple wakes up in the morning, they find an older man with a shotgun standing a few feet away from their tent. At his feet is a young girl who appears to be choking.

Jaime jumps into action. Instead of attempting to clear her airway, Jaime performs an emergency tracheotomy, saving her life. As payment for his service, the shotgun-toting man, Eben, invites the couple back to his property for dinner. Jaime isn’t too sure, but Karen, full of empathy and naivety, convinces him to go along with it. She wants to keep an eye on the injured girl, Beth. They join Eben for dinner, and after Karen heads off to bed, Jaime and Eben swill some moonshine and get to talking. It’s clear from this interaction that Jaime is a condescending prick, even making light fun of the way Eben speaks. Eben, in his own far more subtle way, pokes fun at the inebriated jackass sitting at his dinner table, asking him to say “shit” just to see if he can bring himself to say it. There’s an undercurrent of culture shock going on here, but it’s surprisingly cordial. If Eben is dangerous, he sure is hiding it well.

The couple decides to stay on for a little while longer, just to keep a watch on Beth’s recovery. Karen heads off to get cleaned up, going full frontal in a nearby lake. When she emerges, she is startled by the sudden appearance of a drooling, hissing man. Screaming, she runs off back to the house with the peeper in full pursuit. Karen runs to Jaime’s side, but the drooling weirdo runs right to Eben and gets himself a butt whooping in the process. After calming the man down, Eben introduces him as William, his son. William lives in the old smokehouse and can get riled up from time to time. He’s also responsible for all those headless chickens. Eben tells William to get, and William does as he’s told, running off into the old smokehouse to hide.

Eben takes Jaime raccoon hunting, and as the men get drunker and drunker, Eben fills him in on William’s tragic backstory. When William was a young boy, the family dog grabbed him by the head and trashed him about, permanently damaging William’s brain. Ever since then, William has been biting the heads off of small animals. Eben confesses that he thought of mercy killing his son, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. He reckons that the reason William is interested in Karen is that her hair reminds him of his mother. That would be kinda sweet were it not for the fate that befell William’s mother… and the woman Eben married after her. Jaime begins to feel uneasy, recognizing that Karen might be in danger all alone at the house.

Which of course she is, but to say more would be to spoil the ending. It’s needless to say that things go south very quickly, and our already small cast of characters becomes even smaller before the credits roll. BACKWOODS is predictable in that regard. But in virtually every other way, director Dean Crow and his co-writer Charles Joseph manage to defy expectations. Our lead couple is clearly drawn. Karen has a savior complex, and Jaime’s worldview is divided along clear class lines. These are not complicated people. We tend to see these character types in every bit of southern-fried horror or hicksploitation.

It’s Eben and his family that are more uniquely drawn. They’re not your typical backwoods horror movie family. They’re just a family stuck in a cycle of tragedy. You get the sense that they used to be happy. Eben might take his own jabs at Jaime from time to time, but if you look at where he is at the end of the film versus where he was when he first meets the couple, he’s much more open, even friendly. He doesn’t take Jaime on a coon hunt to put a bullet in his back. You get the impression that he just enjoys his company, that he probably hasn’t had anyone to talk to in a long time. It's actually kind of sad.

William, on the other hand, fits more into the horror movie side of things, but only because he has to, not because it’s where the character belongs. Sure, he bites the heads off of chickens, but he’s not evil. He’s merely broken. Yes, Karen should probably stop poking around the smokehouse, and she should definitely stop going topless within William’s line of sight, but it’s debatable if William wants to hurt people because he can or if he does it because he simply doesn’t know any better. After all, he was just a boy when an animal he was probably playing with joyfully lashed out at him without mercy. We see William is capable of being friendly when he hands a scared Karen a flower. But then, as soon as she’s gone, he picks up a chicken and well… Sometimes dogs are just like that. Sometimes so is William.

BACKWOODS is a strange film. I imagine the final 10 minutes are going to be what most people want to see, just an explosion of violence, but for me, I was actually quite enjoying the laidback character-driven stuff of the first half. A cursory glance at IMDb tells me that this movie has a 4.3 out of 10 rating, and I honestly think that’s a little low. I quite enjoyed BACKWOODS, but not for the reasons I thought I would. I really do wish I had watched it a lot sooner, and I definitely hope that one day I get to watch it in a version that doesn’t look like last week’s moldy trash. An old VHS rip doesn’t do it justice. It really does deserve better.