Dark Woods (2010)

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I usually LOVE "a young couple in the woods" movies...but this just misses the mark over and over! A man and his dying wife go to a cabin where she can live out the rest of her life. The wife one night is assaulted by a stranger, and the local Sheriff doesn't much believe him, nothing comes of it. (At this point maybe it's time to go home...) now the next day the man goes for a run, sees the same man raping a young girl, scares he man off and takes the girl home (maybe now go home..?) at this point the man calls a doctor up who upon inspecting the girl says only, "she'll be fine"...WOW! Yeah, she was just raped but she will sleep it off!!! Also he lets the sheriff know and the sheriff has the young girl stay with him and his wife! (Is this even legal?) now I won't spoil the rest but you can guess where this might all lead, young pretty girl, dying wife, and a very horny husband...yep. The couple adopts her and they go to Wally World! I wish, that'd have been a good movie.

Henry (John Muscarnero) has a wife Susan (Tracy Coogan) who is terminally ill with some sort of cancer. By the end of DARK WOODS she dies. There's a popular expression in American, "we're not out of the woods yet." Henry's mind is muddled with all sorts of imaginary nonsense while his wife is dying. None of this would make any sense to the thinking viewer if taken LITERALLY, but apparently some people could not decipher director Michael Escobedo's subtlety. Mr. Escobedo tried to clue in the clueless right from the start, with a quotation from Dante's DIVINE COMEDY which makes it clear Henry's "dark woods" constitutes all the crap churned up in his id by his wife's impending demise. One must feel SORRY for viewers who somehow overlooked this quotation, and think any filmmaker would expect them to believe an American sheriff would place an abused teenage girl into the keeping of a young guy with a comatose wife to care for in a wilderness cabin for days on end. How many sheriffs could there be without an extra bedroom of their own (Henry's imagined cabin had just one bed)? Everyone else Henry talks to here is likely imaginary as well, except Susan. This obviously is not the most entertaining movie ever, but watching it should not be as hard as understanding an unsubtitled film in a language you don't speak!

I had expected more from this movie, a whole lot more actually. But hey, maybe it wasn't just my type of movie.The story deals with a couple that goes into solitude as Susan (the woman) is dying, and they want to be together. Then while jogging, Henry (the man) stumbles upon a young girl in distress. He rescues Alicia and brings her into their cabin. Then from there, the story becomes one of human emotions, desires, struggles and inner turmoil. Enough said about the storyline without giving too much away.Even though the storyline had potential, I wasn't entertained by it. The movie crept forward in a very, very slow pace, and I found it to be mind-numbing. Had the story moved forward faster, with more things happening, the movie would have been all the more better. For me, the movie took way to long to get from A to B, and that killed the movie for me.The people in the movie were unfamiliar faces, to me at least. And I found the movie was carried by Tracy Coogan (playing Susan Branch) and Mary Kate Wiles (playing Alicia Larch). I didn't find John Muscarnero (playing Henry Branch) to really fully be in character. There was a single familiar face in the movie, though having only a supporting role, and that being James Russo (playing sheriff Demming). There are relatively few people in the movie, and it works well enough actually.One thing that stands out in the movie was that they managed to put together a decent enough movie with a fairly small budget. And that was cool. Always nice when smaller companies put together something out of the ordinary, just a shame that the movie was slow to get anywhere. And also the scenery and sets were nice, I especially liked the feeling of isolation in the forest.Overall, I found "Dark Woods" to be a below average movie. It is listed as a thriller, but there were hardly any thrills in the entire movie. And I think that actually was what lead me to pick up this movie, so I was expecting thrills and excitement. Having seen "Dark Woods", I can now honestly say that this movie, for me, doesn't have enough watching value for a second time.

When I first popped this is my DVD player I have to say I wasn't expecting all that much, but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this story. Of course like any movie it has it's flaws but there was a point about a third of the way through when it got really good. The acting is also well done for an "indie" (especially the young girl and James Russo). And the cinematography is especially outstanding. Of course, the locations seem limited because it's an indie flick, but I found that to not take away from the story too much, especially since it's shot so beautifully and a lot of it out in nature in the beautiful woods. I give this movie a solid 7 out of 10.