Deep in the Woods (2000) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

(Complete spoilers)

Deep in the Woods is essentially a French director's tribute to the Italian Giallo sub-genre, slasher films which use high style and an offbeat artistic presentation of semi-graphic murders.

No question about it, this film nailed the style portion of the requirements. You know the drill. Spooky close up of a bird's eye, followed by a cut to the bird's POV as he flies. Mysterious minor characters who linger too long fondling their knives. Haunted children. A dark, spooky, isolated location. Rooms full of stuffed animals and/or dolls that seem to be staring at the innocents.

You know, the usual Argento crap.

I have nothing against this style. In fact, I think it can be very involving in the best work of Argento and Brian de Palma and others, but no amount of art design and dazzling visual invention can cover up an incoherent plot, or a lack of tension and character development. In order to make a scary mystery movie work, one must do the following:

• make the audience care whether the victims are murdered
• keep the narrative and the behavior of the characters logical, or at least plausible
• provide some scares
• have the explanation make sense, or at least allow the audience to understand what the explanation is

Without those elements, all the style in the world is not sufficient to make an interesting movie, and this film fails across the board in those areas, and throws in some bad acting, and ludicrous dialogue to boot. Not to mention pretension! It's one of those movies where one person delivers a line, then the director switches to the face of the next character to speak, but that character does not actually say anything for some time, then responds with something only vaguely related. Then there is another long pause until the first speaker says, "You never answered my question". Then there is yet another long pause while the second speaker completely refuses to answer, but just does some insouciant gestures with a cigarette or something.

You know, the usual French crap.

The premise is fairly simple. A troupe of young actors has been invited to a lavish castle deep in the woods to provide an entertainment for a young boy's birthday party. They will perform The Big Bad Wolf. As for the birthday boy, the li'l nipper has not spoken or smiled since the day he saw his mother killed, or some such malarkey, and he basically just stares straight ahead at all times. He's like a ten year old entered into a Robert Stack impersonating contest. The little rascal does pop in from time to time in the oddest, most unexpected places, just to stare at the actors ...

Say, maybe he is the killer ...

Or maybe the killer is the creepy gamekeeper. Or the owner of the castle. Oh, wait, the owner can't be the killer. He's the first victim, and is in a wheelchair to boot. Or is all that a trick?

Or maybe the killer is the guy who says he's a cop, but looks like a homeless man. A heavily armed homeless man.

Well, somebody is the killer, because the young actors start to get killed. And the killer is wearing the Big Bad Wolf costume! And not only is there a killer, but somewhere out there in the woods, the cops are looking for a rapist as well.

I guess you might assume that the killer and the rapist are the same maniac, or you might assume they are two different menaces. I wasn't clear on this point at all. The actors clearly think they are two different people, because the surviving actors were blaming one another for the murders rather than assuming it was the work of a local, but the rapes had been occurring long before the actors arrived, so if the murderer was one of them, the rapist had to be someone else. But since the actors are wrong about the murderer being one of their own, perhaps they are also wrong about the murderer and the rapist being two different people. Or maybe the writer is just not capable of rational thought. Beats me. Maybe I'm not capable of rational thought. That would explain a lot!

At one point the incredibly creepy cop, who makes Lieutenant Columbo seem to be as dapper as Yves St Laurent, comes in to say that the rapist has just struck again, not far from the castle, and that the kids should stay inside. In the very next scene, they are outside, walking through a particularly impenetrable portion of the woods - and splitting up to travel alone or in pairs instead of staying together. Was that scene transition supposed to be funny? It seems as if those two scenes came from two different movies, or were edited together in the wrong order.

Later, when the killer was unmasked, I didn't know whether he was the wheelchair guy, or the wheelchair guy's twin brother, or what.  I say this because:

• The gameskeeper, who had been with Mr. Wheelchair for years, seemed to think that his boss really needed that wheelchair. Given that fact, if the owner was the murderer, he had been pretending to be crippled for years, just waiting to invite some unsuspecting actors to the castle for a good slaughter some day. Man, that is one dedicated maniac.
• Before the unmasking, we think the owner is dead. That's because we saw him killed - from the murderer's POV! In that scene, he was saying stuff like "please, don't hurt me". He was not putting on a show or feigning his death for the benefit of the actors, because nobody could hear what he was saying in that scene except the owner, his assailant, and us.
• When he is unmasked, the killer refers to the castle's owner in the third person. "Poor, stupid Axel"

So I guess the murderer had to be the castle owner's evil twin, because if it was the castle owner himself, then who the hell was he talking to when he was begging for his own life in the earlier scene?

In other words, I still don't know who the hell the murderer is; I don't know why he committed the murders; and I didn't care when the three actors were killed, because they were complete douchebags to begin with.

So a dazzling clone of Dario Argento's style added up to absolutely nothing because of an illogical and incoherent script filled with unsympathetic victims.

Net result of a stylistically brilliant film: an abysmal 3.6 rating at IMDb.

There must be a lesson in there somewhere for you youngsters. Something about priorities.