In short: She Came From the Woods (2022)

1987. It’s the last day of summer camp in picturesque Camp Briarbrook for the year. While the kids are carted away in a bus that won’t make it far (spoiler?), the counsellors have the usual nightly get-together of teen melodrama, horniness (this being a movie from the 2020s and not the 1980s, little comes of that), spooky stories about the local urban (woodsy?) legend, and, um, a blood-letting meant to conjure said legend up.

That little ritual works out rather well, and soon the counsellors are beset by possession, an invisible, dangerous force, those kids that didn’t make it far, and whatever else the film wants to “homage”.

And with “homage”, I mean rip off without much of a creative direction beyond fandom, for yes, She Came from the Woods is yet another throwback 80s affair whose only independent ideas seem to be to add some diversity to the cast without actually doing anything with that diversity, sprinkle in lots of gratingly unfunny humour, and just copy stuff from better movies.

Among the film’s other problems is a cast of characters that’s much too big to provide space for anyone to become interesting. Because this is the self-conscious kind of throwback, there’s no possibility for the film just accepting or wallowing in the characters’ inherent tropiness either; yet it’s not substantial enough to do anything better.

The script suffers from a much too complicated backstory that gets exposition dumped at the dramaturgically worst possible moment, and is neither clever nor weird enough to need to be that complicated. The plot really only consists of set-up and characters stumbling around stupidly, broken up by occasional murder, so there’s very little here that seems worth of anyone’s time.