A party of four friends have set out for a hiking holiday in the Utah mountains which should see them getting back to nature, though one of the group, Peter (Jack McClelland), is not the best at being in the wilderness and starts to act up. What none of them are aware of as they follow the trail by the river is that out here a less than welcoming presence is lurking as well, for there is a raving lunatic wielding a large scythe-like weapon that he is using to slaughter anyone he happens across. This deeply antisocial behaviour is steadily bringing down the tourist population as they are thrown from cliffs and have limbs chopped off without so much as a how do you do - will Peter's friends survive?
Will Peter survive? Will the audience survive? There are two reasons Don't Go in the Woods endures, and both of them are not exactly prestigious as you may have guessed from the introduction. The second item of notoriety was awarded thanks to how shoddy the entire enterprise was, with the plot reduced to the barest minimum of slasher movie basics - if you're looking for engaging characters here, forget it as even the killer has more personality than the majority of the victims and potential victims, purely by dint of his distinctive "wild man" wardrobe which some have described as Viking-esque, though he's more caveman than he is Nordic. Why does he have a warmer on his weapon? Who knows?
The first item of notoriety took us way back to the early eighties not long after the film was released on home video. It didn't see the inside of cinemas in Britain, so was one of those works that was released straight to home video by one of those independent companies who would shove any old rubbish out in the format because at that point users of VHS were happy to rent anything they could get their hands on as long as the box cover art looked interesting enough. Soon there was a controversy whipped up about these and so the video nasties panic was born, with Don't Go in the Woods one of the casualties, banned in the U.K. for over twenty years before rerelease after it was decided it wasn't that big of a deal after all.
If indeed it was ever a big deal in the first place as there was precious little to get excited about otherwise. Would horror fans have been the slightest bit interested in it had there been no ban? It's debatable, since the lowest quality shockers can be regarded as good for a laugh and post-Mystery Science Theater 3000 (which did not actually feature movies like this) an industry was created for not very good films to have the piss ripped out of them on a regular basis by fans of such turkeys. In truth, they didn't have an enormous amount to work with here, as director James Bryan (who had gotten his start in soft porn) more or less alternated between repetitive murder scenes and dialogue that served no other purpose than droning padding rather than suspense.
Certainly, Bryan exhibited an enthusiasm for bumping characters off, as not five minutes went by without some hapless extra (usually friends and family of the cast and crew) getting the fake blood dished out over them, though there was the occasional variation such as the sleeping bag hung up from tree device, or the somehow rolling an entire camper van down a hill gambit (precisely how strong was the madman supposed to be anyway? What was he, The Incredible Hulk?). Not helping was the fact that as far as the folks populating the plot went, they had barely any personality to discern between them, the two men and two women of the central group we were supposed to have our final girl or boy (or both?) emerge from virtually identical, with the ladies in the same outfits and sporting the same haircuts, as do the men (though not the same as the ladies, obviously). With dialogue giving new meaning to the word "functional", an electronic score by H. Kingsley Thurber bleeping non-stop and a man in a wheelchair as a joke (?), the end credits theme song almost made up for it. But didn't.
Aka: Don't Go in the Woods... Alone, apparently because the last word was added on the poster, though it's not in the credits.
