Don’t Go in the Woods

Rating: 2.25/5  

Much of Vincent D’Onofrio’s acting career has been marked by craftily off-kilter performances, a tone he struck early on with his deeply unsettling portrait of a man pushed past his limits in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. There’s few other actors who could have convincingly portrayed an insectizoid space alien adorned in a disguise fashioned from a human’s shorn-off epidermis as he did in Men in Black, and he often seemed to be mounting a little competition with himself on “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” to see how many oddball line readings he could get into each episode of a series that was otherwise a by-the-numbers procedural. So it stands to reason that his feature directorial debut would be completely bizarre.

Don’t Go in the Woods begins like a typical horror film, even seeming to deliberately reach back to the heyday of low-budget fright-fests in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when barely a week went by without another batch of yammering, horny teens blithely traipsing to their doom at some summer camp or remote cabin. In this instance, it’s a Brooklyn indie rock band, heading out to a secluded campsite at their urging of their leader Nick (Matt Sbeglia), who’s convinced that they need to get away from all distractions in order to write a hit record that can take them to the next level. He’s pretty surly about the whole thing, which is maybe the first signal that the trip isn’t exactly going to go swimmingly. The next signal is the giant red sign at the entrance to the woods that warns, “Don’t Go in the Woods.” The only way it could have been clearer is if the sign read, “Murders Ahead.”

Despite a strict “no girlfriends” rule, a bevy of beautiful hangers-on wind up following the band into the wild, assembling a sizable enough crew to catch the attention of any masked madman with a heavy sledgehammer at his disposal. The soundtrack bends with spooky synthesizer tones and the body count starts to climb upwards, with a few doses of bloody gore to satisfy the horror flick faithful. The screenplay credited to Sam Bisbee and Joe Vinciguerra (based on a story by D’Onofrio) doesn’t develop the various characters beyond broad, easily identifiable details, but that’s arguably part of the point. D’Onofrio is interested in grounding his film in the highly familiar.

Except, not really. Those standard tropes are there so he can grab the wheel and make a sharp left turn. Don’t Go in the Woods is a horror film, but it’s also a musical. The film is absolutely packed with moony, earnest indie rock songs, most of them structured around the conceit of the band trying out new songs or playing old ones for fun sing-alongs around the fire. It’s as if Once was taking place at Camp Crystal Lake. When D’Onofrio lets his most gonzo instincts take over, the film is also at its most entertaining, with different cast members striding through the woods and singing their hearts out over whatever new trouble they’ve just encountered. Too often, though, it plays out like they were putting on a horror movie and an open mic night broke out (“Hey guys, Georgia’s gonna play!”) It makes the film feel like a surprisingly pedestrian hybrid, an amalgam without an enlivening anarchist spirit.

As a visual stylist, D’Onofrio largely defaults to the straightforward point and shoot approach that served many of his horror forebears, at least until the film roars through its closing scenes and editor Jennifer Lee is called upon to really earn her salary. Assuming that any actor who moves behind the camera wants to make a defining statement with their first film, D’Onofrio is apparently committed to asserting that he’s prepared to approach the very different job with a sensibility that should be familiar to anyone who knows his primary work. It’s going to be stolid, goofy and hard to pin down all at once. He doesn’t have the balance quite right yet, but when that happens, it will be something to see.