City stresses send a group of Atlanta friends out into the remote wilds of Pine Hollow Forest. A helpful phone conversation opens things between Nia and her sister about how Nia needs to take this camping trip to do some healing. So she, some lovable lunk named Ken and her two lady friends ignore the warnings of a seemingly insane forest ranger (hearing voices is never a good thing) and proceed into the infamous area. The ranger’s cabin looks suspiciously like a well-kept downtown apartment and is also occupied by the intense ranger’s saucy wife. Camping can be a shitty time in the best of situations but it’s even worse when the supernatural (maybe) is creeping around and everyone in your little group seems like they packed for a night over in a city hotel as opposed to the middle of nowhere. Stories of missing bodies and Satanic rituals are well known and ignored. Also, the ranger’s warnings of whispers and spirits ain’t getting in the way of Nia’s birthday camping experience. Nia keeps saying that this is exactly what she needed and it’s her birthday… me thinks we hear so much of the same shit because the script simply read “ad-lib here”. They immediately hear voices in the dark and decide to call it a night and not to worry about it. It’s her birthday, so they follow her advice to get some sleep. Nia has intense nightmares/visions, someone dressed in black watches the quartet, the dialogue is a rambling mess, their attempt to leave after the first night is halted by a car that’s not going anywhere and one of ‘em vanishes during the second night. Mia shares her real reason for wanting to come back to this spooky area of Georgia and it has to do with a séance and a mysterious death of a good Christian boy. A two-year time jump closes things on a baffling note and then hits you with a second flash of stupidity. It fits well with the complete pointlessness of everything. This feels like a group of people on vacation realized they had a camera and a setting to film a movie. I’m fine with that, that has lead to some amazing low-fi curios. Unfortunately, it also feels like nobody had any idea what they wanted to do and just had a ninja costume from a big and tall shop to use as a “special” effect. A lack of enthusiasm and abundance of abrasive people put the viewer in a strangle hold that almost leads to tapping out. There are some golden nuggets of dialogue like: “That’s what the woods does. It woods.”, our main character pronounces “therapy” in the best way possible (in one scene she blesses our ears with it multiple times) and cheapjack charm like that ninja-suited villain is hanging around and getting a grin out of me every so often but it’s all mostly an ambling excursion into the boredom that most camping trips offer. You won’t believe it’s only an hour long and not in a good way.
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