KIDS GO TO THE WOODS… KIDS GET DEAD

 2009/83m

Director / Writer: Michael Hall / Cast: Leah Rudick, Andrew Waffenschmidt, Eric Carpenter, Amanda Rising, Kristen Adele, Seth Stephens, Meghan Miller, Kevin Shea, Joseph Campellone, Carly Goodspeed.

Body Count: 14

Laughter Lines: “You’ve got the transformation from victim to victor by the lead character, usually a girl, which, in itself opens a whole new realm of social and political undertones.”

Thanks to Phil M for this one.

Grammar pedants will be annoyed by that title. ‘Get Dead’ indeed. Surely, it should be ‘Kids Become Dead’ or ‘Kids Obtain a State of Death’!?

Anyway, trivialities aside, as far as no-budget homages to the classics go, you could do a lot worse than this twee little number, which appears to err on the side of Friday the 13th (check the fonts used during the credits).

It’s Casey’s birthday and her boyfriend Derek is taking her with some friends to the requisite cabin in the woods. Her younger brother Scott tags along, much to the annoyance of Derek, a similarly destroyable jock Tommy, who’s pot-toking uncle owns the cabin. There’s three other girls too, naturally any cheap teen horror film made in the 2000s wouldn’t be complete without a hot lesbian couple.

Scott’s reading a book with the same title as the film and it seems to prophesize the events that follow. An interesting idea but nobody ever decides to explain why or how, so don’t dwell on it.

They flirt, try to have sex, call each other ‘bitch’ and ‘pussy’ a lot, drink beer, play with a Ouija board and mercifully soon start falling victim to the gas-masked killer, who, like Scott’s book, is never revealed, drawn out, or even named. But at least he has the decency to burn, slash, and repeatedly stab these assholes.

In addition to the usual shenanigans, Kids Get Dead (ugh…) has several sort of Grindhouse-lite ‘commercial interludes’ and is presented by Candy Adams (Goodspeed) as if it’s being aired on a late night horror show. It’s mildly amusing but the breaks tend to occur at peaks of tension, and as those are scarce anyway, these skits are like a vacuum cleaner set to ‘suck pace’.

Ultimately interesting for genre geeks and not horribly made considering the budget, but Bloody Bloody Bible Camp riffed on Friday so much better.