Back in July of 2006, Lucky McKee's first studio film finally got its premiere at Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival after a long delay than spanned almost 3 years. Test screenings in 2005 reportedly sported a different edit plus incomplete music content (hardly unusual for test shows), but that version was retooled by McKee, who refused to be beaten by studio apathy after regime changes at MGM/UA lost faith in the director's troubled film and seemingly chose to forget it even existed.

The Woods was trailed on the Silent Hill DVD – giving hope to McKee's fans, and those fascinated by orphaned or forgotten studio films – but the reasons for its extended pregnancy stem from MGM/UA's sale – a move that also put some high profile Region 1 DVDs into stasis (including Battle of Britain, A Bridge Too Far, and the Sergio Leone restorations only available in Europe until recently), and disinterested executives.

In the making-of featurettes for Sick Girl, McKee's episode for the Masters of Horror cable TV series, the director frequently refers to The Woods as a project he stubbornly refused to abandon so it didn't get chopped up or lost in MGM's corporate shuffle. Various online observers have posted their own comments as to the differences between the test version and McKee's own final edit, and the changes seem to involve re-editing existing material in place of the usual reshoots studios impose on problem films, like the moronic American remake of Pulse.

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The chief problem with The Woods resides in undercooked the script which sets up what should've been the perfect stepping stone for cinematic terror: an isolated private school for problem girls, run by a coven of witches, and a sympathetic character who discovers the deep dark secrets amid much taunting by a vicious clique, and power-hungry teachers.

It's a template previously explored by Dario Argento in Suspiria, though if the kinetic visuals, nasty gore, and Goblin's powerful score were stripped away, the actual script is a pretty weak concoction populated by flat, forgettable characters. McKee certainly exploits the ‘scope ratio in Woods, and makes he it clear the girls, much like the dancers in Suspiria, are at the mercy of rules heavily reinforced by chillingly reserved or emotionally dead adults.

As a writer, McKee's forte is focusing on character relations – specifically the awkward moments between youthful friends as they move through periods of teen angst, stumble through adulthood, and seek some kind of sympathetic and supportive human connection. Those elements dominate May, McKee's feature film debut, and also propelled the drama in Sick Girl ; perhaps more so in the latter, after the director rewrote an existing script into a more character-based drama that otherwise involved a mutant bug with desires to impregnate the heroine and her lesbian lover.

The friendship between branded outcasts Heather (Agnes Bruckner) and Marcy (Lauren Birkell) are at the core of David Ross' Woods script, and McKee has fun indulging in some bonding scenes that have a particularly Lynchian feel; whether it's listening to Leslie Gore songs on a taboo pocket radio or singing hymns in the school hall, the montages evoke a bit of Twin Peaks lore.

Sixties strings pop music – sung or heard in Angelo Badalamenti's series score – evoked the inner passions of that show's teen characters living in an isolated logging town, and McKee creates several effective montages: a highlight set to a vintage Leslie Gore tune has Heather and Marcy sharing the earphones to a pocket radio (recalling Julee Cruise's crooning while the teens bond in a local tavern), and a memorable sequence in which the students sing an eerie hymn (composed by the film's initial composer, longtime McKee composer Jaye Barnes Luckett). In the latter, McKee uses the chorals to show the conformity mandated by the teachers, and the subtextual affections of the two loners which clearly resonates via the actresses' subtle performances.

The film story advances via the pair's acts of rebellion, and their collective coping mechanisms against professorial, familial, and collegiate abuse. The dissolution of their friendship signals a turn towards major plot points, but these have been left far too late into the film's meandering narrative, along with some sudden character shifts – Marcy's inexplicable rejection of Heather, and the sudden personality shift of clique leader Samantha are clumsily edited in close proximity – that make one suspicious additional scenes were either filmed and dropped, or never fully developed for the final shooting script.

Just as weak is the impression that the surrounding woods are a serious danger. The set décor certainly alludes to the woods' omniscience – windows stay propped open (does anyone ever get a cold?) threadbare vines are allowed to grown inside the school, and McKee often has some symbol of the woods (a plant drawing, model, or green room) remind us of a natural presence that's long held its influence inside the school walls - but his repeated use of flash edits, haunting sound design, smothering exterior fog, and weird dreams become deliberate filler, and lose their ability to cheat time within the narrative until an effort to explain all the weirdness finally bubbles to the surface.

Keeping the woods creepy is a tough sell, because in the end you have to deliver a compelling explanation if two-thirds of the film is pure atmosphere. Sam Raimi's approach in his forest-deep Evil Dead films was to start with terror, and balance spilled blood with kinetic montages of contorted sights and sounds; in Satan's Playground, Dante Tomaselli used the woods as a dangerous ocean whose supernatural inhabitants either picked off stranded motorists, or lured them to supposed safe-houses before plunging them into weird nightmares.

Story logic in both films was subjugated by each director's personal style, whereas McKee tried to balance character bits with subtle genre homages and avoided outright clichés; that might be what his final edit attempted to solve, but the film was still obliged to end with a ceremonial finale and some glossy CGI effects – the kind of contemporary genre clichés McKee had no choice but to deliver.

Even in Suspiria, Argento had to attach meaning to all those kinetic death montages; built like an unstoppable prog-rock crescendo, it all came down to a surprisingly quick set of sequences with witches confronting the heroine, and the whole place going up in waves of flames. In The Woods, McKee has fun with some dynamic CGI effects for the tree limbs, roots and branches that keep sleeping teens in stasis until the latest teen offering has been snatched from her bed, but the effects seem out of place in a film that's kept fancy visuals to a minimum, and is preceded by a poorly executed sequence where the forest ensnares the family car when Heather is briefly whisked away from the school by her bickering parents. (In watching the latter, it's surprising how McKee quickly derails the car, when a more clever sequence could have been devised by exploiting the family's confusion as they slowly realize something keeps transporting them back to their start point instead of a highway ramp towards home.)

Fans of Bruce Campbell might find his turn as Heather's dad amusing, though he remains silent in his first scenes, and really doesn't evolve as a character beyond a tormented father who falls victim to the woods' witchery, spits up some twigs after a period of inactivity, and helps his daughter beat the three witches who've plotted a clumsy scheme to return as living physical creatures.

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MGM's DVD is unsurprisingly bare bones, and this perfunctory home video release means McKee's fans and those who've followed the film's delayed release won't get a chance to know more beyond the reports and rumours.

If studio junk like feardotcom is given the special edition treatment, why not films where better directors earnestly tried to transcend a genre? Those paranoid legal disclaimers studios slap at the head of every DVD pretty much absolves them from official blame, so there's no harm in taking a problem film neglected by the studio and letting its makers analyze the finished work as an intriguing case study of why some horror movies just don't work.

Click HERE to read an interview with composer John Frizzell, and HERE for an interview with composer Jaye Barnes Luckett (Poperratic).

© 2007 Mark R. Hasan