Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.
It’s time for another Unwatchable substitution! As I make my way up the IMDb Bottom 100 list, I occasionally come across an entry that proves to be not so much unwatchable as unfindable. For example, #59 on the list is Hababam sinifi askerde. This is a 2005 Turkish comedy, the title of which translates as The Class of Chaos in the Army. It is apparently a sequel to the 1975 film Hababam sinifi sinifta kaldi, which translates as The Rascals’ Class Misses Its Grades. Although available on DVD in the UK, Hababam sinifi askerde is not to be found here in the good ol’ USA. However, I have tracked down an untranslated YouTube clip, which I now present for your viewing pleasure.
I’m sure we could have had a lot of fun with that one – where there’s a big pile of potatoes, big laughs are sure to follow – but alas, it is not to be. Fortunately, the IMDb Bottom 100 is a fluid, continuously evolving entity. All I have to do is go to the current version of the list and search it until I find an entry that is not duplicated on my version of the list, downloaded six months ago or seventeen years ago or whenever I started this insane project. In this case, the lucky movie is called Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!
Or is it? The movie itself seems unclear on its own title. The packaging identifies it as Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!, as does the poster you see here. However, the onscreen title is merely Don’t Go in the Woods. This title actually makes more sense, because during the course of the movie, many people go in the woods and terrible things happen to pretty much all of them, regardless of whether or not they’re alone. In fact, this incredibly shoddy and moronic 1981 slasher movie posits the most overpopulated remote wilderness ever to grace the silver screen.
Our heroes, I guess, are four young, virile backpackers – Peter, Ingrid, Craig and Joanie – but since none of them manage to establish any sort of personality except the whiny guy (I think that was Craig), it’s hard to care what happens to them. They don’t actually get much screen time, since, as I mentioned, there are approximately seven dozen other hikers tramping through this same patch of woods. There’s also a crazed killer. At first it’s unclear whether this fiend is a bear or Bigfoot or a guy with a big knife. It takes about an hour before the big reveal, at which point we learn that the killer is a sort of brain-damaged Jeremiah Johnson mountain man in a great big fur hat. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I have since learned that Don’t Go in the Woods was made for about $12,000, which is about $4000 more than I would have guessed. Director James Bryan (Boogievision, Lady Streetfighter) and screenwriter Garth Eliassen (his only writing credit, although he did play Sleeping Yokel in 1980’s Heart Beat) take a rather loose approach to narrative conventions, and the result is pretty much what you and your friends would have come up with had one of you received a video camera for your thirteenth birthday: a bunch of people running around the woods and getting their limbs hacked off. Fattest kid plays the sheriff.
I could go on, but I couldn’t possibly top this succinct description from Wikipedia: “The hillsides are crawling with fat women huffing up hillsides, nerdy bird-watchers, and young couples, most of whom meet gruesome ends at the hands of a deranged and growling woodsman with a sharp spike.” The only reason Don’t Go in the Woods has any notoriety at all is that it was labeled a video nasty in the UK and banned for many years. This is laughable, since nobody could possibly take the movie’s copious blood and gore seriously. I won’t give Don’t Go in the Woods the full four Maurys, only because the final confrontation between the growling woodsman and two campers gave me the best laugh I’ve had in days. Skip to the 7 minute mark in this clip and enjoy for yourself.
Previously on Unwatchable:
60. Carry On Columbus
61. Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie
62. Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie
63. Alone in the Dark
64. Angels’ Brigade
