THE BACKWOODS (lots of spoilers)
Alric Knebel
I'll say this: THE BACKWOODS was the easily the best movie I've ever
seen about a young feral girl with really big deformed hands.
But let me add this: I'll never again sit through another movie about a
young feral girl with really big deformed hands. Once was more than
enough.
The first superfluous article of this movie is the date of the story.
It's adverted on the screen, "1978, Northern Spain." You don't know
it's superfluous at this time. You nod and say okay: you accept that
we're in Northern Spain, 1978. It's also tacitly conferred that these
are past events that'll have some bearing on some future point. Okay.
So that's done.
Mow the movie begins. These two couples in two separate vehicles are
heading out to some remote location -- in "1978" -- where this one guy
Paul (Gary Oldman; and he was the reason I rented it) has inherited this
bucolic farmhouse, way the hell out in northern Spain, somewhere out
where a road ends deep, deep, deep in a forest. Along the way down the
dirt road, they stop at a rustic little bar. The Spanish locals act
weird, harboring a general hostility to foreigners. They're speaking
Spanish (with subtitles, because the English actors are speaking in
Spanish, too, at this point). There's tension, a one-upmanship thing,
so it doesn't feel like a dangerous hostility. The visitors depart.
Then that's done.
They find the house, and the two separate couples seem to each have
relationship problems. They resign to their separate hostilities. Then
that's done. The next day, Paul and his friend go hunting, during which
they find a girl locked in a room in an abandoned house. She has these
big deformed hands. They're huge, and they resemble crab claws. Oddly,
neither man mentions them. They free her and carry her back to the
farmhouse -- despite her flailing, growling protestations -- where the
women clean her up. Then that's done. Meanwhile, nobody is ever
mentioning these BIG crab-claw hands, like, "Man, look at those fucking
hands," which is what the hell I was saying, hoping I wouldn't be the
only one. But they don't. Instead, it's night and they all go to sleep.
The whole thing was odd. When I noticed those huge hands while the
characters never bothered to mention them, I began to feel as if I were
focusing on some superfluous point of the film. Or maybe I was being
rude, and revealing myself as déclassé. Then I remembered that it's all
STILL happening in "1978." Weren't we supposed to go somewhere else
from there? To someplace between, say, "1978" and maybe "the present"?
If it's not part of some larger time line, why even mention the date
at all? Nothing about the story seemed pertinent to any particular
year. Not the styles, the cars, the houses. Nothing. What the hell is
this about?
The next day, these four guys -- who'd be hillbillies if this had been
Tennessee -- come looking for that girl, and then Paul goes out with a
couple of them, pretending that he and his friends have no idea what
these hicks are even talking about. He leads them onto this wild hunt
in the woods, suggesting whoever it is they're looking for had perhaps
escaped and is loose in the woods. Suspicions abound. Then that's
ALMOST done.
But, meanwhile, one of the hillbillies has been left behind in the
farmhouse, and he attempts to rape the wife in the second couple. He
gets shot by the irate and already stressed-out husband, because he and
his wife have this distance between them, and she isn't doing the least
part to reconcile, and now there's THIS; as if he needed THIS to
complicate things, this other man pounding the hell out of her as she's
forced to bend over a table. Now all of that relationship stuff might
have been interesting, if only it had some context. But it was just put
out there, not too unlike "1978," and then IT was done. On and on, it
went like this, one thing after the other, just done, until the whole
damn thing was done, and you haven't got a clue as to what really set it
all in motion, what anybody's motives were, why everybody started out
feeling so bad, and now leaving you with the impression that the only
reason it ended at all is because the director remembered they were
running out of film and they'd need some for the end credits, and if
that was the fucking case, then THANK GOD they were running out of film.
Now, maybe there are people out there for whom a girl in a wet shirt
might be enough to sustain your interests. I've got to admit, she
looked nice, the shirt clinging and transparent, her areolas visible and
promising to quench your thirst. But the scene was robbed of any
eroticism when she walked into that bar, and some primal dangers were
roused. However, it was a false alarm: the leering barkeeper and his
rural clientele kept their places. Then it was done. Later the two
women in a private moment took their clothes off for a dip in the river.
Very VERY brief. Then it was done.
Now I'm done.
My score: 2.5/5
--
_________________
Alric Knebel
http://www.ironeyefortress.com/C-SPAN_loon.html
http://www.ironeyefortress.com
terry.f...@healios.org
tomand...@live.ca
Also they don't go to bed after rescuing her - they leave in a vehicle and try to take to to the Police but the car is driven off the road when a tree blocking the road forces them to. Funny though - a man in the bar at the beginning of the film tells them about the downed tree but they go that way to get to the authorities anyway. That is why they walk back to the house and go to bed thinking in the morning Paul will take the girl and walk to the village himself.
If you are going to critique a film you should get some big plot parts right.
