Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead (2009/2012) ½

     Yeah, I admit it. If you watch a movie called Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead, you really have nobody but yourself to blame when it turns out like this one did. With that title, writer/director/etc. Michael Hall warned us about as clearly as he could that his tribute to and parody of 1980’s slasher movies was going to be the dumbest, weariest, most pointless thing of its kind to be found pretty much anywhere. Honestly, it would have been perversely disappointing if Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead didn’t test the endurance of even the most hardened and undiscriminating fans of the genre.

     Teenaged straight arrow Casey (Leah Rudick) has a birthday coming up this weekend, and her friend, Heather (Meghan Miller), is planning a celebration that frankly sounds more up her own alley than the ostensible honoree’s. Heather’s jackass boyfriend, Tom (Seth Stephens), has a stoner uncle (The Hatred’s Mike Hall Sr.), and that uncle has a cabin somewhere in the wooded hinterland of Rochester. Heather’s idea is for her, Casey, and Tom to use Uncle Dan’s place as their party pad, bringing along Casey’s boyfriend, Derrick (Eric Carpenter, from Adopting Terror and The Labyrinth)— also a jackass, but a jackass of a different breed from Tom— and their hot lesbian pals, Jill (Shapeshifter’s Amanda Rising) and Robin (Kristen Adele Calhoun). Casey signs on, but on one condition: they also have to bring her younger brother, Scott (Andrew Waffenschmidt). Scott may be a loser-creep, but he’s Casey’s loser-creep, damnit, and she’s going to make sure he’s included for once. Nobody’s very happy about that stipulation— not even Scott himself, if we’re being totally honest— but who’s going to gainsay the birthday girl about the guest list for her own party?

     There are certain obvious inevitabilities on the horizon at this point. Tom and Derrick will be ceaselessly insufferable, of course, both toward their respective lovers and especially toward Scott. Scott, in his social cluelessness, will make a fool of himself pursuing either Jill or Robin, depending on which girl is more willing to treat him like a human being. Uncle Dan will forsake his role as chaperone at the earliest opportunity, driving off to who knows where in his Volkswagen Microbus (itself something of an obvious inevitability) after making sure the kids know where he keeps his stash. And the only reason there isn’t a skinny-dipping scene culminating in either Tom or Derrick pretending to drown as a practical joke is because Michael Hall couldn’t find a pond that any of the cast were willing to set toe in. (The closest Kids Go in the Woods… Kids Get Dead ever comes to being funny is in the scene flagging the latter omission, which ends with Casey and the gang gazing with disgust upon a noxiously polluted lake that we never get to see.)

     But there are also obvious inevitabilities of a more ominous sort. For example, when the kids stop on the last leg of their journey to buy fuel, snacks, beer, and cigarettes, the owner of the gas station, a fellow called Lloyd (Kevin Shea, of Stalker’s Prey and Banshee!!!), turns out to be an old weirdo who plies them with cryptic hints about unspecified dangers awaiting in the woods around the cabin. Then they encounter a pair of shady cops (Phillip Langer and Dory Manzour) who seem intent upon hiding whatever Lloyd was trying to warn them about. And then there’s the most ominous, obvious, and inevitable of all the obvious inevitabilities, the guy in the gas mask (Joseph Campellone) roaming the forest with a big-ass knife, and sticking it into every rando who crosses his path for no reason that the movie ever bothers addressing. Rest assured that he’ll find his way to Uncle Dan’s cabin sooner or later.

     Rather surprisingly, though, Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead does have a couple unusual ideas up its sleeve. I’ll start with the one that figures in the actual plot. The main thing Scott does to convince his sister’s friends that he’s a loser-creep instead of merely a loser is to read trashy horror paperbacks obsessively, and then to describe their contents in such a way that you can almost see him transforming bodily into a single, massive hard-on as he speaks. And would you look at that? The book he brought along to read at the cabin while everyone else is refusing to talk to him is called Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead. As the weekend wears on, Scott realizes that its events are tracking the plot of the novel with eerie accuracy— which would tend to suggest that Lloyd is right, and that Scott and his companions really are in danger from an as-yet-unseen killer closely resembling the one he’s been reading about.

     In a better film, that would eventually mean something, and Michael Hall does try to make it mean something here. He ultimately can’t, however, not least because he hasn’t let anything else in the movie mean anything, either. The killer, as I said, has no discernable motive. Hell, he doesn’t even have an identity. The cops have no intelligible reason for trying to keep him or his crimes a secret from outsiders headed onto his turf, and barely any reason for deciding at the crucial moment that Lloyd was the suspect they should have been looking at all along. Casey and her friends, to all appearances, are just in the wrong place at the wrong time, exactly like the various slabs of Expendable Meat whose disconnected deaths are the means whereby Hall establishes the killer’s presence. Also, Scott doesn’t exploit the fact that he has a cheat-sheet for the killer’s activities in any creative or even interesting way. I suppose that might be because Hall intends for the book to be an unalterable prophecy of inescapable fate, but if so, he never establishes that, either. Indeed, the only use to which Hall ever puts Scott’s book is a fumbling stab at poignancy when the boy realizes, as his sister does not, that slasher stories conventionally end with Final Girls, and that he therefore never had a chance of making it home alive. And even then, Hall relies on our familiarity with the tropes of the subgenre to do the heavy lifting. I’m not sure a novice would recognize what was happening at all— although I concede that the chances of a newcomer to slasher movies starting with this one are effectively nil.

     Hall’s other innovation, if we can call it that, is structural. Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead is put together as if it were being broadcast on a late-night horror host show called “Midnight Movie Madness, with Candy Adams.” Not only does it feature dire recurring host segments in which Adams (played by Carly Goodspeed) gives the most heavy-handed imaginable rendition of a stereotypical blonde bimbo, but it also frequently interrupts itself for fake commercials. Honestly, the film might have benefited from developing a few of the latter a bit more, since it’s only 85 minutes long, and Hall turns out to be just a teensy bit better at aping Amazon Women on the Moon than he is at aping Student Bodies anyway. Mind you, Kids Go to the Woods… Kids Get Dead isn’t really worth watching for the interruptions, either, but they do have the benefit of novelty if nothing else. As annoying as the conceit eventually becomes, it is at least something that I don’t remember being annoyed by before in a hundred other shitty horror parodies.

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