Blackwoods (film)

Plot

Matt Sullivan (Patrick Muldoon) is a travels with his girlfriend Dawn (Keegan Connor Tracy) from their urban residence in Denver on a vacation to the Blackwoods of Colorado, only to discover a motel run by a motel clerk, Greg (Clint Howard), a deranged family, and a horrific secret.

Matt is haunted by the death of a girl from a car accident he caused years ago. Matt was drunk and as he reached for the car radio, he struck the girl as she crossed the road. The guilt that he feels has altered his sense of reality, making Matt's life a mystery full of shadows and phantoms. Now, years later Matt goes away for weekend with his new girlfriend Dawn.

During a stopover in a small town, Matt and Dawn have lunch at a local diner where he notices several of the locals staring oddly at him. On the road, Matt is pulled over by the local sheriff, Harding (Michael Paré) who asks Matt who he is and what he is doing passing through the town. After Matt explains about his private getaway Sheriff Harding lets him go.

Matt checks into a local motel where he interacts with the debauched motel clerk and owner Greg who tries to overcharge him for his room for the night. A little later, after a wild session of lovemaking, Dawn goes for a walk. While she is away, a strange man with an ax comes into the motel room and attacks Matt who escapes. Matt calls the police where Sheriff Harding shows up and after finding no one around, openly suspects Matt of having an agenda to the suspicions of his story. After the sheriff lets Matt go, again without arresting him, Matt phones his friend Jim Will Sanderson where he tells him about Dawn's disappearance and asks Jim to come to his aid.

After that incident Matt goes into the woods, looking for Dawn. There he encounters Dawn's family who tie him down and put him on trial for the murder of the girl years before. It turns out that Dawn is the twin sister of Molly, the young girl that Matt ran over with his car years earlier after he was driving drunk following an argument with his former girlfriend. The backwoods Franklin family find Matt guilty and he is sent back into the forest to be hunted down by the family. The deeper Matt runs into the forest the farther his mind is lost to the Blackwoods.

Matt manages to ambush and kill two of the family members, Jack and John, pursing him through the woods. But the film's climatic twist comes when Jim appears after having tracked Matt down and Matt suddenly kills Jim, after thinking that he too is in league with the Franklin family. It turns out that Matt's girlfriend 'Dawn' is only a figment of his imagination. All of the interactions with Dawn and the rest of the family were fabrications that stemmed from Matt's guilt of running over the young woman years earlier and Matt at this point as become totally deranged and paranoid.

Sheriff Harding follows some leads that Matt told him earlier into the woods and to the old Franklin house which is unoccupied and in disrepair (confirming that Matt's "trial" was indeed fabricated in his head). Harding finds Jim's dead body and then chases Matt through the woods to arrest him, only for Matt to run onto a main road where he is run over by a speeding truck and killed. The final scene shows Sheriff Harding telling his story to Beth, the waitress at the local diner, and how Matt's mental instability led to him dreaming up this waking nightmare about Dawn, her family, and of the other encounters in the Blackwoods.

Cast

Release

The film was released direct-to-video on September 3, 2002, in North America.

Critical reception

Stephen Holden from the New York Times gave Blackwoods a positive review, describing it as "smarter and more diabolical than you could have guessed at the beginning." Lou Lumenick of the New York Post gave a more negative review, calling Blackwoods a "low rent, direct-to-video-caliber thriller." The film contains several Boll trademarks, including multiple flashbacks, repeated use of slow-motion and a twist ending. It has an 11% 'rotten' rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Until Rampage in 2009, this film was known as Uwe Boll's "best" film.