Once again, the fates have manipulated my existence so that I unintentionally watched movies with a common thread. Separated by a decade, these two films are pretty routine, but I preferred one over the other.
IT WAITS (2005)
I’m shocked that this creature feature from director Steven R. Monroe (I Spit on Your Grave remake and its sequel) isn’t in heavy rotation on SyFy or Chiller. It was probably rejected because there’s not enough monster and not enough of a body count.
Cerina Vincent (the original Cabin Fever, Freaks of Nature, Tales of Halloween, Return to House on Haunted Hill) is a park ranger sitting up in her tower watching over the woods as she suffers from the guilt of a drunken car crash that killed her best friend. Luckily, her cute park ranger partner shows up to fuck her.
This poor pair of actors has to deliver some of the absolute worst dialogue for a majority of the film. How bad is it? One of the lesser characters that passes by even uses the word “flummoxed.”
Once the couple realizes some sort of creature is after them, the guy goes to die—I mean, to get help—and the main girl is left alone to fight the monster on her own. But first, she runs into a Native American man who knows all about the legend of the creature, which means more awful dialogue.
In old school fashion, we don’t see much of the monster for a majority of the film, which is a negative in this case. The only fun part is when it finally comes out full force and the main girl goes into bad ass mode to kill it. Sadly, this lasts for only 15 minutes of the entire film. The creature is mostly traditional rubber monster stuff, and it’s awesome!
It also fricking flies, so it has a very Jeepers Creepers feel to it. Not to mention, despite being a creature, it acts more like a masked killer in a slasher, even rigging dead bodies to drop down and scare our main girl at just the right moments.
GIRL IN WOODS (2016)
Ever sit through a completely derivative film that isn’t even fun for cheap thrills and wonder the whole time why you’re bothering? Well, I do it constantly, so of course I fell victim to Girl in Woods. What do you want from me? Charisma Carpenter is in the cast.
Juliet Reeves London (Automaton Transfusion, Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! Strippers vs. Zombies, Second Coming) plays a woman who had a traumatic experience as a child, witnessing her father get shot, which we learn through her nightmares. Now she’s heading to a cabin in the woods with her man, played by Jeremy London (her real life husband as of this writing).
Almost immediately, something awful happens to Jeremy, leaving the main girl trapped in the woods alone, having more flashbacks of her past (with Charisma as her mother), seeing a shadowy figure trailing her, and being influenced and antagonized by a devil’s advocate version of herself.
She must face her own demons and defeat the evil creature stalking her to get out alive! If you can’t figure out exactly how this one plays out, you are a total amateur.
I like Charisma Carpenter, but I’m not going to see that one. I did see It Waits and remember I only liked the monster itself.
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