Some films should never be brought to the big screen. She Came From The Woods is one of those very films.
No amount of homage to Children of the Corn, Bucket of Blood,Nightmare on Elm Street, Sleepaway Camp, and countless other legendary cult classics could not help She Came … from looking so trife on screen. Throughout the whole film I sat chanting in my mind that I was “not too old for this ride”, but despite my mantra, with “She Came From The Woods” being set nearly a decade before I was born, I could see that even the children featured in the film were too old for this shit. The actors all looked as if they struggled to remember their lines, the budget looks as if it was all blown just for one Freddy Kreuger funeral pyre scene, and the only highlight for the entire crew is the bass in Tim Williams score that honestly would better fit a porno than this shit show that continues the tradition of making horror look like a genre that should not be taken seriously.
The air from the fan used to substitute actual wind could be heard audibly on screen just like echoes from the actor’s voices on multiple badly edited open space scenes. A competent editor must have been sacrificed for Bloomquist’s inclusion of retro toys like rotary and pay phones, full blown cassette decks, and transition’s that look as corny as something out of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
When Bloomquist has the opportunity to go full gore he instead opts for kiddie cutaways, spending the budget on jarred jam and then attempting to turn that investment into a focal point of the film so he wouldn’t run into any problems with his alleged business loan he took out to make She Came From The Woods. In essence the disasterpiece that is She Came From The Woods is the definiton of backwards hustling at it’s worst.
The only great scene was when Emily Rafala had been killed early on in the film; and even that was butchered with the misstep of using a bunch of jelly instead of a proper prop tongue.
Casting a Dolph Ziggler lookalike in Shawn McAllister made sense, given the amount of wrestling manuevers and props used for the action sequences like something out of a dream joshi match. Except, instead of wrestler’s dedicated to their craft, Bloomquist instead hired a bunch of novice’s and washed up D-list actors to make his cinema dreams come true only to make a nightmare for audiences who actually enjoy horror films.
With films like She Came From The Woods and The Mean One being released on screen, I now understand why not every film gets approved by the MPAA, and this has nothing to do with any perceived lewdness but a discernment of actual talent, which She Came From The Woods desperately lacks. An embarrassment to motion pictures, created seemingly just to generate dollars from negative press as many forms of media in the 2020’s that relies heavily off of inspiration from classic touchstones, She Came From The Woods degrades not only the genre of horror due to it’s sloppiness, but also the genre’s of camp, schlock, and cult films that have no intention of being funny, but end up being so. Cult status, a film which “She Came From The Woods” tries so hard to achieve and fails as the effort is painfully noted by those who paid for a seat to witness this Hindenburg of the early 2023 film quarter.
Bloomquist should be barred from the Academy for making this picture and FrightFest should be ashamed that they fought for this film to have a wider release. I understand that for all the inspiration that Bloomquist drew from making a horror picture that made it to the big screen must have been a childhood dream, but She Came From The Woods stands as a testament that not every dream made when a director’s age was relative to his shoe size should be realized. A joke that can only get laughed at so long until the laughter is forced to keep from the pain of having to bear the exaggerated run time of this once short film, Bloomquist needs to rethink his aspirations as there should now be a court mandated restraining order between Bloomquist and filming equipment after he had the dim idea to bring She Came From The Woods from script to screen.
Score: .5/5
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