SpuffyWeb
Sadly Over-hyped
Matialth
Good concept, poorly executed.
Breakinger
A Brilliant Conflict
Derry Herrera
Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.
jessica-a-ott
This movie is awful. The acting is awful. The "scares" are cheap and predictable. I could have put together a better cast with my niece's high school drama club. I will watch any movie that claims to be scary but this one is one of the worst I have seen. Not worth the effort to pay attention to - the characters are one-dimensional, the "scares" are cliched at best, and the acting is elementary, which is a compliment. No one in this movie should ever been given another part again! I wish i could give it zero or even negative stars to keep people from wasting their time!
smakar
I've been watching so many low-budget movies lately (although they've always been a weakness of mine) that I decided to come up with a system for myself so I can be fair (this system is for movies I watch at home - I just movies seen in the theater by how many cigarettes I've smoked outside, zero obviously being the best).Anyway, my system involves three categories: a) Story/Plot/Characters, b) Acting, and c) Production Values (Editing, Sound Quality, Visual Appeal)I ranked each category based on the following scores: 0 = Abysmal 1 = Below Average 2 = Average 3 = Above AverageOn top of the above total possible of 9, I have a wild-card point given if some facet of the film made me to WOW, or made me wish to see it again very soon because I enjoyed it so much.Here's what I came up with for The Spirit In The Woods (category followed by score):Story/Plot/Characters (1) The story wasn't bad, but it was nothing new or memorable. We've seen this basic plot many times before. What kept this from being rated Average were the characters, most of which were VERY annoying. I was looking forward to their on-screen deaths.Acting (1) Most of the acting was average, but there were a couple below average which brought the score down.Production Values (Editing, Sound Quality, Visual Appeal) (2) Overall, this was technically well made. I thought the camera work was fine, the audio was (for the most part) clear and I could understand what was being said, and I thought one scene in particular was effectively creepy (for those who have seen it, the hands).So my total score for The Spirit In The Woods is 4, which compared to a couple of movies I've seen recently, is a GOOD score!
je-suis-mignon
This movie was a huge disappointment, first of all it doesn't make any sense, there are lots and lots of incoherence and it's halfway between the usual omnipotent camera and the found footage style. The script is overall pretty bad, the actors are not better. The movie is not scary at all and it feels very heavy (especially in the beginning). We have no idea about the fate of three characters, but they do not really seem to be in a bad situation, which does not even serve to put some mystery at the end, it just seems like they had no idea what to do with them so they didn't bother doing a final scene for them (they are the main characters for god's sake!). Finally, most of the characters are not even coherent and this movie doesn't even deserve more than 1 in my personal opinion, and I am not the only one who thinks this way. Unless you are looking for a shitty movie to make fun of, don't watch it, end of the line.
C.H Newell
I was very interested in this film, and admittedly it was mostly due to the poster, as well as the name in general (something creepy about a school out in the woods somewhere). However, I was highly disappointed. I really love found footage, but unfortunately most of the films in the genre are tired clichés of previous efforts, and more often than not the genre isn't used to its potential; it really does have potential to be used appropriately, and has been in a few films here and there.Not all of the acting is absolutely terrible, but there are a few people in particular who really produce some less than ripe performances. I'm not even sure of everyone's name in the film honestly. The ex-girlfriend of the main character has no emotion in her speech whatsoever, which makes it absolutely unbearable listening as she spits out her lines; her new boyfriend is also fairly rough, and I felt like his Martin Luther King, Jr. line was so forced, as if the writers assume every black man in America would quote the Doctor at some point or another. Then a couple shows up during a storm who take bad acting to new depths: the boyfriend is a stereotypical hick with a terrible mullet while his girlfriend just so happens to be a psychic (how fortunate for the ghost hunting young people). There were definitely a couple little parts I enjoyed. When we first see the little girl from the movie's poster, there are some bits of her wandering in and out of the camera view, which are tense, but other than that this film mostly falls flat for tension. There's some typical nonsense about a crazy man and his mentally challenged son, trapping girls, killing them, or something of the sort; by the time all of this came around, I was pretty much tapped out on interest for a back-story in the film. It all ends typically with a police officer showing up, and there's really nothing innovative about the way it all clues up. One of my biggest problems with the story was the main character and his ex-girlfriend have this strange relationship, and the new boyfriend is now there, but none of it makes any difference to anything. They include a small talk between the ex-lovers about what seems to have been an abortion she had without him knowing about the pregnancy, and the only purpose it serves is to create one of those situations you ALWAYS find in found footage where one person is angry with another, so then this causes some sort of fallout that jeopardizes members of the group. Systematically boring. If it had led somewhere, maybe it might be worth it, but it feels like they just tossed in a contrived subplot about the abortion, and worst of all it never gets explored any further; they waste 3 minutes of screen time just to lay out a subplot that goes nowhere.I give the film a 2 out of 10. My reason for even giving it two stars is due to the fact most of the film is in black & white for moments in the present, as flashbacks to the back-story are primarily in colour; I found this to be fairly neat, and was the only redeeming qualities. If they had focused more on story instead of the little productive value this film has, maybe they could have worked this into something average, but unfortunately for the filmmakers this is just a huge flop among a massive orchestra of flops in the found footage genre.