A group of college kids drive to Western, Massachusetts (filmed in Canada) for a ski trip. Jill (Hannah Kasulka) is our voice of reason, although she is with Derek (Craig Arnold) who doesn't know about Philip (Corbin Bleu). Alison (Sasha Clements) is the victim of some roofie team rape, post the video type of thing. And no one likes Bree (Humberly González) because she is pretty. Brothers Tod (Kyle Mac) and Matty (Alexander De Jordy) even up the group.

A blocked road causes them to take a detour through Stoughton Valley where there was a witch trial as people who entered that area of the woods had seizures. They get stuck on a posted road and Alison has a seizure. . .

Most of the film takes place inside the vehicle. It would have been nice if they were stalked by Cujo the hungry bear, but that was not the case. I would have liked to have seen a little more "Yellow Brick Road" effect, but that didn't happen either. It was a little disappointing. And there were no witches either.

Guide: F-word. No sex or nudity.

You know in horror movies when characters mostly do that one thing they shouldn't be doing? Depending on the actors, the story and other circumstances you may be able to forgive these things ... I'd argue it is near impossible to really forgive anyone involved here.

Especially the inciting incident ... roads taken and all that. You do wonder why anyone would trust someone as obviously out of touch and clueless as the one our "group" believes in here. There is an underlying and depending on your view very well or poorly handled backstory involving one of the girls. She is also the center of many more scenes of "come on" - "are you seriously going to do that?" ... again, suspend your disblief ... because if you don't ... well it is going to be a "painful" watch. It is shot in a very good way though and you can see some merit(s) in it.

Well, for starters, lets just say that you shouldn't have too high expectations for the 2019 movie "Witches in the Woods". When I sat down to watch it here in 2020, I hadn't even heard about it before. But I liked the movie's cover, and given it being a horror movie, of course I found the time to sit down and watch it.

Now, I didn't know anything about the movie, so I had no expectations. So director Jordan Barker had every chance available to impress and entertain me. I ended up only mildly entertained, however. Yeah, this movie - while it was watchable - just wasn't a particularly outstanding horror movie.

I will say that it had every premise readily available. I mean, a remote forest, heavy snowfall, encroaching night, no means of escape. It had so much potential, but somehow writers Christopher Borrelli and David Lafontaine just failed to utilize that potential to the maximum possible outcome. And the end result was ultimately just mediocre.

The acting in the movie was good enough, taking into consideration the limitations of the script and director. But while adequate performances did count for something, it just wasn't sufficient to make up for the shortcomings of the movie.

For a horror movie, then "Witches in the Woods" was rather bland, bordering on being boring at times. There just was so little worthwhile in terms of scares and creep factor in the movie. Again, a shame, because there was so much potential within reach.

I managed to sit through the entire movie, but this is without a doubt not a movie that I will be returning to watch a second time. My rating of "Witches in the Woods" is a very bland and mediocre five out of ten stars.