Backcountry - Adam MacDonald (2015)

If you are willing to put yourself into the hands of a great storyteller, they can do wonderful and terrible things for you just with the backdrop of their story. If you rely on a mediocre storyteller, you are in for a tedious experience. So what advantages can a filmmaker take with the characters' surroundings? In the right hands, they can terrify you so deeply that you'll never, say, go into the water again ("Jaws") or never take another shower ("Psycho".)

So is Adam MacDonald up to the task? Does "Backcountry" do for the woods what "Jaws" did for the water?

Alex (Jeff Romp) has wonderful childhood memories about hiking and camping at a beautiful lake deep into the forest with his family. Now, he wants to share this place with his girlfriend, Jenn (Missy Peregyrn.)


So there's our background. We are in the woods where one can get turned around and lost or get into all sorts of trouble like meeting a threatening stranger or a bear. Our heroes deal with the fear of the uncivilized world.

First, they come across a stranger, Brad (Eric Balfour) who seems nice at first and has a campfire dinner with him: fresh fish. It's a sequence we have seen played out countless times. The stranger and our heroes laugh with each other, then the stranger turns rude, then aggressive. It's a trick used by suspense/thriller films as far back as any of use remember.

When they part ways, that specific threat is gone. Alex and Jenn only face the unknown of the wilderness.

Every time there is a small emergency, or the couple gets a fright, you expect them to turn around and go home like any of us would do. But of course, these guys are horror film protagonists and therefore, by definition, stupid. 

So they plow through the woods until they find their destination. But Alex doesn't seem to have the memory he used to. They can't find Alex' beloved lake. The're in the wrong place with no map, no cell phone, no food and no way out.

To put it simply, they're lost. At about the half-way point, the question of what is the most terrifying thing in the woods is answered: BEARS. Bears are the scariest things in the woods.

At the beginning of the "Backcountry," Alex teases Jenn about bringing bear spray with them. Turns out bear spray is no joke.

But if a bear is determined to drag you off somewhere into the woods, spray or no spray, he will most likely get his way.

It comes down to how fast can you run, how high can your crawl and how healthy is your will to live?

When "Backcountry" starts, you'll see some potential in the film.

Their interaction with Brad, the creepy stranger they came across in the first act, showed promise. That sequence was admittedly tight and menacing.

After that, all attempts at horror or suspense fall flat. We are left with a tedious exercise of a filmmaker trying in vain to build a successful suspense/thriller. But there is really no suspense here. We just sit there and to think to ourselves, "Could the bear just eat these two pricks so I can go make a sandwich?"

So skip the movie and you make that sandwich. You deserve.

I'm not sure why I took the energy to write about this, but I did, so the least you can do is skim it. Here you go.