Backwoods (2020) Review
High school cheerleader Molly (Isabella Alberti, TRIGGERED) woke bound and gagged in the trunk of her boyfriend’s car. That was the high point of her night. After escaping and fleeing into the nearby forest, she comes face-to-face with the town urban legend: The Hangman, a deformed zealot said to lynch male trespassers and keep the women as “brides”. Now, Molly, along with her best friend and would-be rescuer Noah must work together to avoid becoming his latest victims.
BACKWOODS, directed by Thomas Smith (DEMON SQUAD), is short (just seventy minutes running time) and has occasional issues with sound but otherwise this low-budget slasher flick is a passable, if distinctly average, time-filler. The story focuses on high school cheerleader Molly as the narrative bounces back and forth between the events leading up to a party she attends to her later escaping from the trunk of her boyfriend’s car before ending up a captive of the town’s urban legend The Hangman.
Selected as “Best Horror Feature” at the 2020 Another Hole in the Head Warped Dimensions Film Festival, my only issue with BACKWOODS is that there’s very little here that you haven’t seen a number of times before so in summary it’s a well-acted low-budget slasher that unfortunately suffers from familiarity-overload.
OFFICIAL TRAILER
