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Blackwoods was originally supposed to be an original story about a man on a mountain trip with his girlfriend, whose vacation turns upside down when he sees someone break into his hotel room. However, Uwe Boll ended up making it, so now it's about video games. Now, the plot descriptions don't mention any video games, and it's not supposed to be based on or a tribute to any game, but Uwe Boll was nice enough to insert pre-year 2000 video game footage of police shootouts in the slums as part of this wilderness movie anyway. Boll, of course, is best known for making the video game movies Alone in the Dark and House of the Dead, and he recently finished making Ben Kingsley's Bloodrayne, even though no one wanted him to.
And this is a formality, and you already know it, but the movie makes no sense. I mean, it SERIOUSLY doesn't make any sense. You could show the movie to a group of psychics and ask them, "WHY?!" if you wanted to discredit fortune telling and scrying forever. If you don't believe me, here are the first three scenes of the film (skipping the opening credits and the sheriff's opening hellos with a diner waitress). It opens with the sheriff looking out the window and getting a phone call, cutting to a distorted guitar twang, cutting to Patrick Muldoon (Starship Troopers) washing his face in a bathroom mirror before picking up a knife, cutting to Patrick Muldoon sitting by his bathroom door, cutting to Patrick Muldoon waving his arms around a lot, cutting to a S.W.A.T. team attack in Grand Theft Auto 2:
Now, I have to warn you, as the movie goes on, the editing actually deteriorates into gibberish. Uwe Boll didn't so much hire an editor as he did buy a pair of scissors before realizing he couldn't see the film in its non-projected, celluloid form. So he cut every roll of film up and placed the pieces together randomly in the hopes they form something understandable.
They don't.
This is perhaps most obvious during a patented Uwe Boll sex scene in the film. Very few Hollywood sex scenes I've heard of include footage of a car odometer, but this one does. In fact, here's a breakdown of the sex scene footage:
- Length of love scene: Two minutes straight
- Number of strobe shots: All
- Number of shots of a car odometer: 2
- Number of shots of Patrick Muldoon's car, him smoking a cigarette while driving, or people walking on the road: 24
- Number of shots of doctors calmly working in a hospital: 2
- Number of shots of Patrick Muldoon pacing in a circle: 9
To give you a taste of how touching this heartfelt scene is between two soulmates, here is a clip of the sex scene, with slow, emotional music playing as we see dramatic, slow motion shots of Patrick Muldoon throwing his girlfriend face-down onto the bed and taking her doggy style while grabbing the back of her head:
There's actually a twist ending to the movie that makes that sex scene a lot more disturbing. But you'll probably catch on to the twist within the first few minutes of the film. If you don't, well, watch the trailer to Blackwoods, and the narrator will be nice enough to tell the twist to you in detail, with helpful footage to clarify it further. If you don't care about spoiling the film, the twist is as follows:
(Spoiler twist!) Ok, so the woman, Patrick Muldoon's girlfriend, doesn't exist. She's all in his head. So basically, he had a two minute sex scene with himself. Anyhow, this doesn't excuse the rest of the film. It's sort of like when a judge says, "Taking all those drugs explains why you killed all those people, but it doesn't excuse it.
Even if you don't know that there's a twist coming, it's very clear early on that this movie isn't about real people, Patrick Muldoon or imaginary girlfriends alike. At least, I don't know very many actual people who deal with stress by flashing back to images of waitresses' faces. Here's a clip of Patrick Muldoon, after he witnessed an axe-wielding maniac break into his room twice. Now, he just looked through the front door's peep hole to see that the maniac is trying to break in a third time. So, after he naturally waves his arms in a marching band for a while and flashes back to people taking off their sunglasses, he finally calms down and logically decides that if an armed maniac breaks into your room twice, there's no chance they could do it a third time successfully. Thus, he curls up in bed and goes to sleep.
Plot aside, perhaps the best mark that this is a Uwe Boll film is that you can't see anything for most of the film. Uwe Boll is unique in the way he can fearlessly shoot two hours of black and call it a movie. In his chase scenes, he seems to attach cameras to the fronts and backs of people as they run, to capture moving shots. However, he literally ATTACHED the lens to their fronts and backs, so all you can see is a black back of a jacket or a hillbilly's head.
It seems that Uwe Boll would actually be offended if people weren't angry or despairing from his films. He inserts many little plot points that relate to nothing, for the purpose of upsetting us. For instance, near the end of the film, Patrick Muldoon's character kills his best friend in the woods. And then his friend's clothes disappear. Don't ask me why or where the clothes are. Patrick Muldoon doesn't put them on, they're not strewn around the ground, they're just gone.
Here is a clip of the most understandable dialogue, most watchable editing, and most coherent and linear scene of the entire film:
I'm sorry.
So, read the review and can't wait to see slapstick actor Clint Howard watch porn in a hotel room for most of this psychological thriller? Here!
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