Native American Sean (Sevy Di Cione) and a couple of his friends come to a supposedly haunted forest looking for a cursed tree. Sean is following a trail laid down by his grandfather in a pretty eldritch looking book, trying to right the wrong which caused the supernatural problems the area is now suffering from. Things don’t go terribly well for the group, nor for the parallel wood traipsers of Jennifer (Jennifer Luree) and Kiyomi (Naomi Ueno), because the Evil around here is physically as well as spiritually infectious.
I had rather a lot of fun with director/writer Mauro Borrelli’s WarHunt, so taking a look at this earlier example of his work that just happens to also be about people encountering the supernatural in a creepy patch of forest seemed like a good idea. This is a bit less slick than the later movie, clearly made on an even tighter budget, but it also shows some of the same elements I enjoyed so much there. Mainly, Borreli has a great eye for the creepy picture and so manages quite a few highly effective and genuinely interesting and inventive shots and scenes of plant-based body horror and rather original witchcraft. Practically every horror scene here has one really clever or creepy bit that elevates everything around it, turning what could be a very by the numbers kill show into a movie that’s rather more macabre than these things typically get.
To be fair, there’s also a lot of not terribly involving character interaction on screen, with middling acting and middling dialogue, but I found myself okay with these moments of slight tedium, because there was always the next cool little scene of plant witchery to look forward to.
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