In 1987, a group of counselors accidentally unleash a decades’ old evil on the last night of summer camp. As the situation turns bloody, the group is forced to confront what stories are worth telling and what secrets are worth keeping. – (Source)

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 67% (Critics) / 26% (Audience)
Letterboxd Rating: 2.5 based on 636 ratings
Directed By: Erik Bloomquist
Written By: Erik Bloomquist and Carson Bloomquist
Starring: William Sadler, Cara Buono, Clare Foley, Spencer List
Studio: Mainframe Pictures

The Good:
I greatly appreciated how The Bloomquist Brothers told this ghost story as a homage to slasher films of the 1980s with buckets of bloody good kills and a lot of humor. Every frame of this movie is a loving tribute to my favorite era of horror and not just in the subject matter but in the visuals and pacing of the film as well. Watching She Came From The Woods gives a little of that nostalgic feeling I used to get when watching a new horror VHS tape I picked up from the local video store back in the day.

Small children are creepy in general but homicidal small children are right up there with out of context clowns when it comes to things that freak me the hell out. So throwing in a bunch of possessed little kids who rip people to shreds like the most ravenous Romero zombies was an unexpected but enjoyable addition to this movie.

One of the touches that I really like was the way characters made sure to do very non-traditional anti-horror trope things like insist no one go into the woods alone or check to see if a body they find was actually dead. That bit of common sense was cool to see amid all the insanity.

The Bad:
I am a big fan of William Sadler and he is usually a major plus in any movie he appear in but for some reason Sadler was very under-utilized in She Came From The Woods. Sadler’s character of camp owner Gilbert McAlister was absent from the movie for a pretty large chunk of its run time and I missed seeing him because the introduction to this character made him so likable.

Most of the characters were really paper thin and I would’ve liked to see a bit more character development before people started getting bumped off.

The Ugly:
Camp counselor Dylan was a lunatic. I am all for there being one not nice person among the characters in a horror movie but this guy was a bit of a psychopath. He seemed to be on the verge of raping and murdering his co-workers throughout the whole film.

Final Verdict: A humorous and gory homage to 1980s horror that manages to still have some modern sensibilities without losing any of the nostalgic fun the filmmakers were going for.

Loomis Rating: She Came From The Woods gets 3 out of 4 Gun-Totin’ Dr. Loomis’