Review #286: Within the Woods (2005)

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #3 - Within the Woods (2005)

Watch it here on EffedUpMovies.com!

The third Camp Blood movie, and the final one I'll be covering this month. (No, this isn't the Sam Raimi short film "Within the Woods" that eventually became The Evil Dead- this is an entirely different movie with the same name.) It seems clear that the creator of this series really, really liked the name "Within the Woods"; it was the name of the "movie" being "made" in Camp Blood 2 about the events of Camp Blood 1. If CB2 had gone differently (read: actually had a coherent storyline) I think it would have been really clever to have this movie actually be the movie they were trying to make (kind of like if the Scream series included one of the Stab films as an actual film you could go see) but instead we get just another rehash of the same plot, but with a few more years' worth of pop culture and fashion sprinkled on top.

Within the Woods takes place a few years after Camp Blood 2, when a TV producer decides to make a Reality Show about the Camp Blood murders. He gets five attractive twenty-somethings to go to the woods, and if any of them survive 24 hours without leaving they win a million dollars. He has some tricks planned to scare them away early and forfeit their winnings, but his plan goes awry when an actual killer clown shows up and people start dying for real!

I remembered very little about this movie from my previous watch (nearly 15 years ago), which actually makes me need to take back something I said in my last review- this movie DOES pay off on something I considered a missed opportunity! There's a sequence in Within the Woods where one of the campers/contestants is telling the story of the killer clown (because all three movies, sharing the same plot, need an identical campfire exposition scene) and he mentions that a year after Tricia was attacked by the clown for the second time, she became the next killer herself! I was thoroughly impressed, even if it was just a brief mention (and even if the killer in the flashback is briefly seen without a mask and it definitely was not Tricia, but some dude). There were a couple times where I thought I remembered who the killer was, but ultimately it caught me pretty well by surprise (largely based around the fact that the movie doesn't at all explain how the killer was able to set up a fake dead body of themselves so as to be in two places at once). The twist is relatively well done compared to the previous two entries so I guess it gets points for that.

But, of course, I need to complain about some things.

Just like how the previous movie created an absurd caricature of what filming a movie is like, this movie creates an absurd caricature of what making a reality show is like. The producer's plan was literally just "Invite five people to spend the day in this park, set up a bunch of cameras, and bing bang boom, hit TV show basically makes itself". Imagine your favorite reality show. (If you don't like any, imagine Jersey Shore.) Now, ask yourself how much that show would suck if 100% of the footage was from static cameras in the corner of each room. (The answer: it would suck a lot.) Reality shows obviously aren't "scripted" in the traditional sense, but to make one you still need to put a LOT of work into planning it. You need to put a LOT of work into shooting it. And while it's beyond the scope of Within the Woods, you need to put a LOT LOT LOT of work into editing it. (Basically, a reality show is made by recording hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage, and editing the absolute best parts down to ten minutes interspersed between confessionals, replays, and commercial bumpers.) 

If Within the Woods were an actual show it would need a dozen cameramen, assistant directors following the contestants everywhere they go and nudging them to do and say certain things, and weeks of painstaking preparation done to set up the park exactly the way that the producers need it. Instead, what we got was a bunch of static cameras (that the contestants seem surprised to find despite signing up to be on a TV show) all set a hundred yards away from any of the action, and a group of people with no direction and no encouragement to do anything so most of the 24 hours is spent with them just sitting around. (And yet, as little sense as it makes, every time something interesting occurs it just happens to take place somewhere extremely convenient. Most of the time it's a conversation directly in front of one of the static cameras, but one time, one of the characters decides to pee directly under the hanging body of a slain contestant. Out of this entire nature reserve, out of all of the trees or bushes he could have chosen, he just happens to pee directly under this dead body, and he just happens to do it the moment the body starts dripping blood. And of course he doesn't see it, because this movie is nonsense.)

It's also worth mentioning that although the movie in general looks better than the previous two (the video quality is better, the wardrobe and makeup is better, and the cinematography is mostly better), the special effects are considerably worse. The previous two movies made liberal use of a gimmick blade (basically, they had a machete with a section cut out so they could put the cutout over someone's arm or head and pour fake blood on it and it would look like the blade was cutting into them), which is kind of lame but at least it's something. In this one, however, no attempt at gore is made in basically any case- there's just a shot of the clown swinging a blade, a "swoosh" sound effect, and then a shot of the victim with a splash of red paint on their arm or neck or whatever. It's really quite disappointing to see the effort drop so much when this movie clearly had a much higher budget than the last.

I just feel like Within the Woods lacks a lot of the charm the previous movies had; and those didn't even have much to begin with. It was still fun to laugh at but out of the three movies I think this is easily the most forgettable.

Overall Rating: 2/10 Posthumous Music Careers

Nostalgic Rating: 2/10 Foreshadowed Electrocutions

Visible Goofs: In the final scene when protagonist Jessica is driving her car, the camera lingers on an Introduction to Law book sitting on the seat next to her. However, the spine of the book is visible, revealing that it's actually a dictionary they slapped a fake law cover on. I guess getting an actual Intro to Law book would have been too much work?