Film Review: No One Sleeps in the Woods Tonight (2020)

And now for some more Netflix Horror with No One Sleeps in the Woods Tonight (2020)! Warning: SPOILERS.

Welcome to Adrenaline: Offline Trekking Camp, where teenagers are forced to spend time away from computers, mobile phones, and other electronic devices with Internet access. Unfortunately, at around the same time the new crop of campers arrive, 2 seemingly unstoppable cannibal twins escape from the basement where they've been kept for years by their fearful mother...

This seemed to be a fun, gory, Friday, the 13th-type slasher and I was eagerly anticipating the reactions of the OTT enthusiastic camp staff and the bloody chaos caused by the killer duo. Unfortunately, they never get close to the camp and instead come across a small group of campers - Zosia, Julek, Bartek, Aniela, and Daniel - and their group leader, Iza. There's also a random detour into the nearby church that looked more like an excuse for killing an evil priest than anything else. The characters are thinly sketched - Zosia has a tragedy in her past that adds nothing to the story but marks her out as the serious one; Julek is the nerdy gamer reciting the horror movie sins that will get you killed; Bartek is gay in a conservative country; Aniela is the hot girl who wished others would see past her looks; Daniel turns out to be a virgin; and Iza is the ineffectual adult unaware of the danger. That's fine because in these types of movies, what matters are the killings. Before the twins cross the group's path, there's time not only for some quick introductions, but also a completely gratuitous sex scene between Daniel and Aniela, which shockingly isn't interrupted by one of the basement dwellers. It's only after she leaves that one of them bashes Daniel's sleeping bag against a tree with him inside. His disappearance prompts the group to commit one of the cardinal sins of horror: SPLITTING UP. This will, of course, end as well as you'd expect. I thought the split happened too soon, and would've liked to have seen them react to the threat as a group. I know this is closer to Friday, the 13th, but as a 90s Slashers fan, I prefer to see everyone panicking together before being picked off one by one. That none of them tried to return to the main camp was just odd, as was the lack of walkie-talkies. Iza should've had a way to communicate with the others. She also should've had enough sense to avoid the creepy AF farmhouse she, Zosia, and Julek find in the woods. Here is where they find Daniel, and his secret phone, which will lure more than one person back into the basement of horrors. But really, if there's a signal in the middle of these deep woods, why the hell doesn't Iza have her own means of communication? That's the problem with a modern setting - there are things that just don't work. In this case is the necessary isolation that really shouldn't be so isolated. Anyway, this first full-on encounter with one of the cannibal twins was good and better than Daniel and later Aniela's deaths. There also seemed to be some dark humour, though the movie as a whole isn't funny.

It's when the running around begins that things start to unravel. After Aniela dies, Bartek runs away and reaches the church, where the evil priest will tie him up because he figured out he's gay. Luckily for him, one of the twins shows up and feeds the priest to a nearby woodchipper. He also appears to find Bartek, though later turns out he didn't. Like I wrote earlier, this is just random, and Bartek's survival makes no sense. Meanwhile, Zosia and Julek find a farmer who had a previous encounter with the twins that cost him his legs, and tells them all about them. And this is where the movie took a turn for the very ridiculous. Some people may find it funny, I don't know, but for me it was just stupid. The twins aren't freaks of nature - they became like that because of a meteor they found when they were children and whose goo possessed them. Yes, really. The goo will play a much bigger role in the sequel, which I'll make sure to avoid like the plague. Moving on, after hearing this and seeing Daniel's corpse and Iza's severed head being tossed around, Zosia decides that the best thing to do is to... return to the creepy farm and get Daniel's phone. Even by horror movie standards this is unbelievably dumb and unsurprisingly ends with Julek dead and Zosia chained in the basement. But that's not the only stupid decision that she makes; after picking the lock with the knife one of the twins so kindly left stuck on a dying Julek, she decides to... not escape right away and instead attack a sleeping twin with a machete. This is practically suicidal, though it sorta works. Unlike Zosia, Bartek isn't feeling suicidal, but he ends up being shot by the farmer who thinks the twins are trying to break in. That was nearly as random as the church, and the twins don't even turn up at the farm, though they must know about it.

For the finale, the movie brings in a bored cop who will be cut in half, leaving Zosia with his car. Naturally, instead of just driving away, she decides to hit reverse and run over the other twin. Twice. Yes, it works, even if only temporarily, but that she risked doing that was just crazy. Of course, in the end they both come back to life, as you'd expect from cannibal killers powered by meteor goo.

VERDICT

No One Sleeps in the Woods Tonight is more gross than scary. It starts well, but ends up missing opportunities for greater bloody mayhem. Zosia was too dumb to live, Bartek's death was lame, and frankly, I didn't find the killings that impressive. The twins' backstory needed a more comical, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil-like tone, but while some of this looked like it could’ve been intended as a horror comedy, the movie just isn't funny. Not the worst thing I've found on Netflix, but not the best either.