The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Backwoods Brutality is a term devised by this site to refer to a sub-genre of horror films that began in the 1970s where city dwellers innocently wander into remote rural areas (not always necessarily backwoods) where they are variously hunted, imprisoned, brutalised and slaughtered by the locals. The locals are usually portrayed as uncouth hillbillies or degenerate in their ways, sometimes in-bred and even cannibalistic.
The genre began with Straw Dogs (1971) but took off with the success of Deliverance (1972), which put many of the tropes in place. The next few years produced classics such as The Last House on the Left (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), along with many imitators. The films came with a focus on the brutality and sadism and attracted much censorship controversy.
The genre underwent a revival in the 2000s with a cluster of remakes of and sequels to the 1970s classics and many other works paying homage and reusing the tropes. The period also saw a number of efforts translating the tropes of the genre to international locales.
A drifter who likes killing tattooed girls and a girl who enjoys eating the flesh of victims meet and love blossoms. Where you expect this to go in the direction of something like Natural Born Killers, it fizzles out
This is the British equivalent of a Backwoods Brutality film in which Tony Curran is a towtruck driver who traps and kills motorists to salvage their belongings
For the most part a standard variant on the staple of people being stalked through the backwoods. Things are buoyed up by an effective twist but that fails to excuse the fact that almost nothing happens
A surprisingly reasonable effort that relocates the Backwoods Brutality film to England with people menaced by mutant creatures emerged from the rural canals
Wilderness survival horror in the same vein as Deliverance but with a Chick Flick spin. This starts promisingly but director/star Katie Aselton fails to push the survival scenes for anything dramatic
Despite the title, this is a horror film that takes place in a mine (albeit one where the former inmates of an asylum lurk). This plays out fairly well by a set of familiar genre tropes and delivers a solid degree of tension
Oddball Australian Backwoods Brutality film with a man imprisoned by a strange family in Finland who intend to feed him to their hulking son
This is like a Western version of The Hills Have Eyes. Exceptionally written – slow, sombre and character-driven, containing one of Kurt Russell’s best performances, before emerging into a brutal horror survival story
A blatant copy of Hostel wherein a trio of students cross the Mexican border and fall prey to a Santeria cult. Despite its derivativeness in the plot department, this emerges as a brutal and fairly well made film
New Zealand-made variation on the Backwoods Brutality film with a group of trampers being hunted through the bush by a psychopathic farmer
Highly effective British venture into the Torture Porn fad made not long after the successes of Saw and Hostel. A brutal and harrowing tale about women kept prisoner in the woods that travels to some grim and gore-drenched extremes
A homage to 1970s Backwoods Brutality films like The Texas Chain Saw Masscare and in particular The Hills Have Eyes, albeit filtered through the retro lens of a modern take like X
Mickey Keating makes a Backwoods Brutality film that has borrowed a good deal from The Most Dangerous Game about a woman abducted and forced to make a survival run through the desert with her bare hands
Italian horror film that comes with many homages to classic horror films, wound together in a Folk Horror plot that satisfyingly delivers the goods
Mike Figgis, the director of Leaving Las Vegas, visits the Backwoods Brutality genre in this Southern Gothic, but despite a top drawer cast, this never does more than stir lukewarm cliches
Andy Serkis and Reece Shearsmith are inept kidnappers in this black caper/horror comedy – imagine something like A Life Less Ordinary peopled with characters from a Guy Ritchie crime drama
Micheal Bafaro is a justifiably obscure director whose entire career has been built on recycling other horror films. This is his version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which is passable until a Sixth Sense-styled twist ending
This starts out seeming like a Backroads Brutality film with an innocent family being attacked after taking a side road detour, only to end in increasingly stranger supernatural territory
A reasonable and effective Canadian entry in the 1970s Backwoods Brutality cycle with Brenda Vaccaro on a weekend getaway with a boyfriend as they are brutaised by three petty hoods
Danish film that is largely an uncredited remake of Straw Dogs (and a far better effort than the official remake a couple of years later). This has a dark, unrelenting bite that savagely indicts a racism at the heart of modern Denmark
Harrowing wilderness survival film from John Boorman about four men on a trip downriver that fall afoul of hillbillies. A classic that was highly influential on the formation of the Backwoods Brutality genre.
Yet another effort about teens running around the backwoods being stalked by a madman. This does better than most with the psycho of the show being an original character, given an intense, domineering performance from Gonzalo Menendez
Rob Zombie’s sequel to House of 1000 Corpses and a more polished film, probably Zombie’s best. On the other hand, Zombie’s nihilistic worldview and sympathy for the psychopaths does take one aback.
The first film that Tobe Hooper made immediately after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a dementedly OTT Southern Gothic with Neville Brand as a backwoods motelier serving up his guests to the crocodiles
Highly effective British variant on the Backwoods Brutality film with an innocent couple being pursued through the woods by a group of murderous children. This gets its teeth into you with gruelling tension and rarely lets up until the end
British director Charlie Steeds delivers a well tuned homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that gets it right in ways that most of the Texas Chainsaw sequels don’t
From 1970s exploitation director Charles B. Pierce, this charts similar territory to the Backwoods Brutality cycle in the claimedly true story of a couple who buy a house in the South and then experience a mystery assault
From the heyday of the slasher film, this seems to be trying to conduct a slasher version of Deliverance. Largely forgotten today and unremarkable but for an amazing cast of before-they-were-famous faces
A modestly effective action film written by/starring stuntman Corey Michael Eubanks where he is forced by backwoods hicks to compete in bare-knuckle fights
Xavier Gens delivers a French copy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This is largely by the numbers excepting for a gore level raised to what must be a maximum for the genre
One of the most unique horror films in some time, an entirely original South African film work where forestry works encounter a living forest entity come to life around them
A Pakistani copy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Backwoods Brutality film, all served up with reasonable vigour. It is fascinating seeing the genre tropes translated between different cultures
Backwoods Brutality Chilean style. This has the look and feel of a lost 1970s film that some people insist on calling grindhouse. Not the most polished work but this does deliver assorted brutality, gore and cannibalism
The film that made the world take notice of Alexandre Aja. Aja serves up a brutal and gore-drenched variant on the Backwoods Brutality film, although things fall apart in an absurd twist ending
Sequel to the 2006 remake of Wes Craven’s Backwoods Brutality classic (not to be confused with the sequel that Craven made to his original), this is premised around a series of extremely gory set-pieces
The second film from Wes Craven, a classic in the 1970s Backwoods Brutality cycle with a family stranded in the desert as they come under attack from a family of cannibals lurking in the hills
Wes Craven’s Backwoods Brutality classic gets a gore-drenched makeover from Alexandre Aja. One of the better amid the 2000s fad for horror remakes where the original is dragged into the modern day in some interesting ways
Wes Craven makes a sequel to his earlier Backwoods Brutality classic but the result is a mess that is all over the place and counts as one of Craven’s worst films
A Backwoods Brutality effort that is somewhat better than usual thanks to a darkly acerbic David J. Schow script that constantly subverts the expectations of the genre
One of the early mockbusters from The Asylum about a in-bred family of cannibals that live in a cave. This was made to come out the same time as the remake of The Hills Have Eyes
A Backwoods Brutality film that becomes quite gore-drenched. Written by its leading man Paul Logan who casts himself as a perfect action hero wading in to kick hillbilly ass
A modest Found Footage film that builds up an effective mystery about the disappearance of a hiker in the Nevada backwoods. Three sequels followed.
An oddity that seems to start as a film about IT espionage and then becomes a survival horror with a paintball team on a corporate retreat being hunted through the woods
Rob Zombie’s debut film was propelled into an infamy it didn’t deserve it was banned by its distributor. Zombie only slavishly rehashes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with a constant posturing for shock effect that becomes tiresome
Despite borrowing the title, this has the no connection to the 1953 film with Vincent Price as a mad waxworks curator and is a modern slasher film. Nevertheless, director Jaume Collet-Serra does come up with some very inventive dispatches
A quite reasonable Backwoods Brutality item with a group who go hunting in backwoods Oklahoma but stir up the inbred poachers and end up being hunted themselves
One of the most raw and savage films ever made, this sits on a dividing line between true horror and exploitation as we experience Camille Keaton being raped with no detail spared before exacting a brutal revenge
The harrowing 1970s raped woman on a revenge spree film is given the remake treatment, although is watered down in many key areas. The revenge scenes however are played up for a particular nastiness
I don’t enjoy watching these rape and revenge films. Continuing to make sequels showing abuse definitely crosses an exploitative line. After 41 years, director Meir Zarchi and star Camille Keaton re-team to make a sequel to the original
English variation on the Backwoods Brutality film that almost entirely takes place inside a car as a couple become lost and are taunted by unseen figures. This generates an incredible degree of ominous foreboding
Australian historical film that seems unsure what it wants to be and takes a long, meandering time before ever arriving at being the horror film it announces itself as
A particularly strong and underrated variant on the Backwoods Brutality film. From Jeff Lieberman, director of the cult killer worm saga Squirm and the LSD flashback psycho film Blue Sunshine
An obscure Japanese film with quite a WTF element about a backwoods motel where things get very strange – the hosts slaughtering the guests, a zombie wandering around
A solid Spanish variant on the Backwoods Brutality cycle in which a man driving through the countryside is shot at and pursued by mysterious hunters with rifles
Slasher film in which a group of unlikeable teens on Springbreak are slaughtered by backwoods hicks in the Everglades. Sold as a sequel to Lake Fear despite neither film being connected in any way
Wes Craven’s first film, a savage shock to the system about a group of psychopaths that brutalise two girls. With this, Craven inaugurated the Backwoods Brutality film; this is still one of the best of the cycle
A disappointing remake of the harrowing Wes Craven classic where the violence has been tamed down and the film is entirely missing the irony of the original’s savage ending
Supposedly a The Texas Chain Saw Massacre prequel that offers us a Leatherface origin story. The least Texas Chain Saw-like of the sequels and eventually a far cry from the original
The third of the Texas Chainsaw films where the rights have now been inherited by New Line Cinema and the brutality of the original promptly watered down to MPAA standards
From the people who made Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, a film where the nursery rhyme of Jack and Jill somehow morphs into a variant on The Hills Have Eyes
A New Zealand-made horror film in which two friends find themselves trapped in a small rural town where the dead keep returning to life
An overlooked homage to the slasher film. This doesn’t set out to parody, deconstruct or subvert the tropes, rather is just a well-made and affectionate tribute to the genre’s 1980s heyday
This starts out seeming like it is going to be a regular Backwoods Brutality film about a regular family threatened by hicks before expectations are abruptly turned on their head
An Indonesian copy of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that is one of the most enthusiastically gore-drenched bloodbaths in ages. This announced directors Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto to the world
The Y2K Problem was a now largely forgotten social apocalypse that never happened so why someone is making a film about it now is a scratch of the head. This is a Backwoods Brutality film that abruptly jumps tracks to become a monster movie
Studio-backed attempt to enter the Backwoods Brutality genre ends up as an uncertain black comedy that fails to push the envelope anywhere near what its models do
A parody of the Backwoods Brutality film. One of the very first films produced by Lloyd Kaufman of Troma fame
Group of friends are attacked by a horde of albinoid creatures – this is the whole of the film with no more explanations that that. The self-absorbed characters and the director’s obsession with including undressed girls at every opportunity gets in the way of developing what could have been a decent film
Underrated Australian horror film that prefigures The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in its dialogueless story of a woman attacked and imprisoned by a mad farmer. Directed with considerable all-out effect
The only film ever directed by Dan Aykroyd, a bizarre oddity that was a huge flop on its initial release. The film is a strange comedy set in an American Gothic junkyard town where even the smallest legal infractions are punished by death. Aykroyd can’t seem to decide it the tone is comedy or horror
An Australian Backwoods Brutality comedy, which amusingly inverts the genre’s clichés, not dissimilar to Tucker and Dale vs Evil
A Belgian-made venture into Backwoods Brutality territory that keeps heading into stranger and more disturbing places until it almost seems to be taking place on another planet altogether
This reverses the sympathies of films like Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Rather than having people tortured by backwoods hicks, one man is forced to survive on a brutal run for his life through the more disreputable parts of L.A. while hunted by homeless.
Ti West made the extraordinary X earlier in the year. Here he and the greatly underrated Mia Goth return to make a prequel
Not to be confused with the recent tv series Penny Dreadful, this is another in the recent spate of multi-director horror anthologies – The ABCs of Death, V/H/S films etc. Directed with a retro vibe, the episodes are expectedly uneven but better than might be expected from the hands involved
A Backwoods Brutality entry from the increasingly underrated Adam Mason where the entire film has been shot in a single take. Often brutal but much of the film seems monotonous with indulgent improvised performances allowed to dominate the show
One of the most conceptually confusing films I have seen in some time – it starts out seeming like a film about people hunting a near-mythical giant pig before abruptly veering off into Backwoods Brutality territory and then out of the blue introducing a sinister cult to the mix
Another of the horror versions of children’s stories, this has a in-name-only connection to Winnie-the-Pooh’s Piglet and is otherwise a variant on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre about a growth-hormone enhanced killer
Film in which the entire US Western seaboard falls into social chaos after being hit an EMP burst focusing on one girl’s journey to safety across anarchic territory
Beautifully shot Sissy Spacek starring work of American nostalgia set in rural 1940s Texas that takes a turn into Southern Gothic in its last quarter
The Backwoods Brutality film given an LGBT spin where a lesbian couple run afoul of backwoods rednecks
The third sequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Usually reviled by fans, this is not unworthwhile, capped by a genuinely insane performance from a then-unknown Matthew McConaughey
A quite good but little seen Backwoods Brutality film from the great era of Canuxploitation with overtones of Deliverance as hikers in the wilderness are harassed by mysterious figures who play taunting psychological games
Psycho road movie in which Christopher Lambert must rescue his family after they are abducted by a gang. An amazing cast list deliver subtle and effective performances
Rather funny British-made parody on Backwoods Brutality cliches where a work group of a team-building exercise ending up hunted by East European locals
French Backwoods Brutality film heads in some admirably weird and gross directions but falls apart at the end
A group of friends travel to Ireland and go on a tour searching for magic mushrooms. In between assorted drug hallucinations, someone or thing begins slaughtering the group
A German-made copy of the Backwoods Brutality cycle that only rehashes clches and frequently verges on the amateurish in execution
The title is misleading – we expect some kind of internet based horror film but the show telescopes down to being no more than a Backwoods Brutality effort. On the other hand, it is not taking itself too seriously and some of the twists become entertainingly absurd
A beautifully evocative Walter Hill film where National Guard soldiers on training manoeuvres are hunted through the Louisiana swamps after accidentally shooting at Cajun locals
Bizarrely overwrought film in which a successful city lawyer is made prisoner by a backwoods voodoo priestess
An Australian-made variant on the Backwoods Brutality cycle where a whitebread couple on a sailing trip are tortured by hicks. Nothing beyond the cliches or remarkable about this.
The concluding chapter in a desultory trilogy of films based on the eerie home invasion classic The Strangers. The surprise is that this ends up being the best of the three films
Strong and powerful formative entry in the Backwoods Brutality genre where Dustin Hoffman and wife Susan George stir up locals in a small Cornwall town and are forced to mount a brutal siege after he shelters a man hunted by a lynch mob
Another wholly unnecessary remake that waters the raw savagery of the original down to a safe tepidness. Everything that the original set down has now become formulaic
An appealingly politicised variant on the Backwoods Brutality film in which two rogue US border guards decide to set up their own home Guantanamo Bay … not Torture Porn but an effectively brutal study on the effect of torture
An absolute horror classic, a film that has been conceived as a harrowing assault on one’s nerves. This has become a landmark genre classic and led to numerous sequels and copies but rarely any that matched the original
A Texas Chainsaw sequel in 3D with chainsaws and gore coming out at the screen seems the complete antithesis of the raw savagery of the original. The result is like a formulaic modern slasher, while the film is wrecked by a ridiculous reversal of sympathies in the last half
The first sequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre where Tobe Hooper returns and pushes the series into an outrageously black sense of humour
A remake of Tobe Hooper’s landmark classic that presaged a host of inferior 70s/80s horror remakes throughout the 2000s/10s. What we have is now a different film although not entirely an uninteresting one