She Came From the Woods (2022)

After its UK premiere on the main screen at Frightfest last year, Erik and Carson Bloomquist's homage to 1980s summer camp horror pictures gets a digital release from Blue Finch.

It's the last day of summer at Camp Briarbrook and as the last busload of kids is driven away the camp counsellors settle down to a final night party that will involve drinking, messing about and, of course, ghost stories, or rather the legend of a sadistic nurse who terrorised the camp many years before.

Apparently all it takes to summon her ghost is for a counsellor to be injured (they all prick their fingers) and ask for help. And wait. And then the bodies start turning up.

SHE CAME FROM THE WOODS ambles along amiably enough for the first twenty minutes or so before upping its game with some unexpected violence after which it sort of totters along, punctuating it scenes of characters talking but displaying little sense of distress of urgency that they've seen friends and colleagues murdered. The film is ostensibly set in the 1980s but little more than lip service (and a few items on the soundtrack) is paid, with little feel for either the era or the films that were made then (except perhaps some of the more mediocre ones).

If you yearn for the summer camp movies of yesteryear than you'll want to check this one out, as will all William Sadler completists - he even gets to sing in this one. Otherwise SHE CAME FROM THE WOODS tries hard - perhaps rather too hard -  but doesn't manage to be the nostalgic retrofest it so desperately wants to be. Here's the trailer:

SHE CAME FROM THE WOODS is out on Digital from Blue Finch on 26th June 2023