review

A Big, Bad Subconscious Lurks in a Dark Forest
By STEPHEN HOLDEN, New York Times

At first "Blackwoods", a supernatural thriller crammed with slow-motion photography, garish blue-tinted flashbacks and other special effects, appears to be a cut-and-dried low-rent horror film about a nice young man and his girlfriend whose trip to the country turns into a nightmare.

Even before Matt Sullivan (Patrick Muldoon), a writer of promotional films, and his perky new gal, Dawn (Keegan Connor Tracy), set out for the hinterlands to visit her family on their ranch in the woods, there are ominous signs that they are headed for big trouble.

Glancing out his office window to the street where Dawn is waiting in the car, Matt notices her chatting with a grim-looking stranger in sunglasses. When he later asks who it was, she says it was someone asking for directions, but you can be quite sure he will show up later. Dawn also has a way of teasing Matt that doesn't augur well for the future of their relationship.

Once they've reached the country, Matt is stopped for speeding by an eerie poker-faced sheriff (Michael Paré), who orders him to watch his language and then sends him on his way with a warning to be more careful. During the interrogation, Dawn hides in the back seat (she actually seems to disappear for a moment), explaining later that had the sheriff seen her, he would have talked her ear off.

The two stop at a roadside restaurant where Matt exchanges ambiguous glances with a waitress who he imagines is flirting with him. And yes, the sinister man in sunglasses materializes. The next stop is a motel where Matt has a hostile encounter with the geeky, leering clerk (Clint Howard), who directs him to a room where the television set plays nonstop pornography. Matt and Dawn make love, and she goes out for a walk and then vanishes.

While Matt is waiting in the room, a axe-wielding stranger dressed in black and wearing a stocking cap appears at the door, and Matt desperately fights him off. Increasingly panicked, he summons the sheriff and calls his best friend from the city to come to his aid. Then he plunges into the woods, winding up outside Dawn's home, and peering through the windows he observes a family powwow.

Until now, "Blackwoods" has appeared to be a standard-issue nightmare of an innocent caught in savage territory - a sort of cross between "Deliverance" and "White Line Fever" - with odd, inexplicable glitches. As the truth comes out and the movie turns the tables on its troubled protagonist, those glitches don't seem so odd. Matt winds up bound to a chair and facing a sadistic family tribunal in which he is tried for a hit-and-run death.

If "Blackwoods", which opens today in Manhattan, is far from a future cult classic, it turns out to be smarter and more diabolical than you could have guessed at the beginning. Directed by Uwe Boll from a screenplay by Robert Dean Klein, it plumbs psychic territory where the supernatural meets the psychotic in a Freudian forest. By the end of the movie, it is abundantly clear why Mr. Muldoon's Matt is not as virtuous as the movie has pretended. The pieces of this small, brooding genre film may not fit together, but when it's over you can have some fun sorting them.