I had not heard about the 2022 horror movie "Something in the Woods" from writer Deanna Gomez and director Alexander T. Hwang prior to sitting down to watch it, as I had stumbled upon the movie by random luck. And I do believe in giving a movie a fair chance, so that also applied to "Something in the Woods", though the rather low rating of the movie was causing some alarm bells to go off at the back of my mind.

And sometimes you just got to stop and listen to those alarm bells. Yeah, "Something in the Woods" was definitely not a good movie, and the low rating is a clear indicator of exactly that. The storyline was so very generic, mundane, flat and uneventful that it was quite a struggle to sit through the movie.

The character gallery in the movie was flaccid as well, and I have to say that I didn't care an ounce about any of the characters as they were one-dimensional and brought nothing of any interesting flavors to the movie. A shame really, because the acting performances by the small cast ensemble wasn't all that bad.

For a horror movie, then "Something in the Woods" was a swing and a miss. Unless, of course, you consider a storyline of nothing happening as being scary, then you're in for quite a treat.

My rating of "Something in the Woods" lands on a two out of ten stars. If you are a horror aficionado, like myself, then do yourself a favor and don't waste your time, money or effort on this one.

... and it ain't a good movie. At one point in the film, one of the main characters complains that she's hungry; she hasn't eaten since that morning. She's so hungry, in fact, that she cuts off the pinky and ring fingers off of one of her hands and tries to eat them. When the "finger food" fails to satisfy her hunger, she attacks her companion and tries to bite a chunk out of her lower leg.

The story is stupid. The acting is beyond atrocious, the monster is one of the worst that I've ever seen. The characters make every single stupid, boneheaded decision that you could possibly make in a life-threatening situation and the ending of the movie is utterly inane. I'm sorry that I wasted the time that I did watching this turd. I've enjoyed bouts of explosive diarrhea with simultaneous projectile vomiting more than I did "Something in the Woods".

After exposing a senatorial conspiracy, a reporter finds herself abducted by a crazed daughter of the senator looking for revenge by undertaking a hunting session in the woods, but when they find the woods patrolled by a vicious creature from folklore are forced to work together to get out alive.

Overall, this was a pretty underwhelming genre effort. Where this one works is the work done here to build up the creature attacks as shocking and quite thrilling. With the use of sudden shock appearances crawling out of the woods to charge and swarm his victim which has a great starting point. That becomes even more apparent in the second half where it begins to utilize the mimicry tactic to lure them out into the woods where it can attack them in more favorable environments leading to some chilling scenes of victims being lured to their eventual confrontation with the creature through this notion of thinking that a friend is calling for them. Elsewhere, the series of chases and escapes that make up the race to get out of the area have a thrilling energy to it and feature some of the only real genre action in the film which is quite fun on its own. There are some rather big issues present with this one. One of the main drawbacks here is the highly uninvolved and generally unappealing that leaves a lot to be desired with this one. That both of the women at the center of the film are highly unappealing and unlikable to be around, from the reporters' open disdain for doing anything other than breaking the news of someone's downfall or the captor's who plan to seek revenge on her disgraced senator father by kidnapping and forcing the woman who did that into a life-or-death chase through the woods. The whole point to this is so ridiculous and nonsensical that it's hard to take it seriously much less care about two people as scummy and unlikeable as they are. The heavily dialog-based outcome of their situation doesn't do this that many favors and causes this to be rather unappealing. Moreover, the film manages to be undone by a rather dull and dragged-out pace which isn't that investing. By thinking that these people are interesting and worth the time time to be around, we get agonizingly long stretches of film dominated by these two going back-and-forth in aggravating arguments while trekking through the woods to reveal the captors' masterplan or awkward attempts at asserting control which is all laughable and groan-inducing as it forces the film to eventually partake in the cliche setup of rivals being forced to worked together to get out of a dangerous situation together. As well as unnecessary interjections by a reporter relaying useless information about the incident, these all manage to keep the creature until the later portion of the film which doesn't really have that much excitement. As that ends up lowering the blood and gore due to not having a lot of screentime with the creature running loose, these end up lowering the film.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Violence.