Timber Falls.

Welcome to an experiment. This is a joint review. I'll be interested in your feedback on this especially with the layout. Today I am joined by the lovely Rosie Baillie - you can check out her stuff here and the brilliant Jon Linnell - you can check out his stuff here to do a joint review on the 2007 horror movie, Timber Falls. All of our reviews are different than my normal ones because of course, there are three of them, so they are condensed to get all of our opinions down in a similar space one of my reviews written by just me would be because I know you couldn't be bothered to read like a thirty paragraph long review, haha. Enjoy!

Timber Falls is the story of two young lovers who go hiking in some backwoods for the sake of a romantic few days and some sight seeing and just how very wrong it all goes with a stupid fucking twist ending, fuck what was the point of that?

The main reason I even found Timber Falls was because everyone who watched Rogue River called foul on it for the fact it is apparently a not very good rip off of this movie right here. Personally I see very few similarities between the two and would go as far to say Eden Lake stole more from this film than Rogue River ever did but it seemed only a logical to go away and view and review this movie. 

Ideally this probably wasn't the best film to use for our first joint review, because I have a specific angle on it. But most of the films I have lined up to review are either too pretentious or foreign to really be a starting point for this project, that being said Rosie and Jon's opinion on the film is going to be different to mine in the sense they haven't seen and aren't comparing to Rogue River. I'll leave you Rosie's thoughts first, then you can chew on Jon's and then I'll leave you with mine. Enjoy!

Within the first five minutes, I was dreading having to watch the rest of the film, it was painfully cliched. Imagine if you will, the scene from Scary Movie with Buffy and Ghostface in the locker room where she says 'Now I'm gonna fall over and break my leg', that for me described the first few minutes. Despite this I was pleasantly surprised by Timber Falls.

The plot is seriously the sickest and most screwed up I've ever watched, yet you can't help but watch, in the same horrified and curious way you can't help but watch Jeremy Kyle. 

What I really enjoyed about it was, unlike the majority of horrors I've seen, they took the time to make me care about the characters, thankfully their acting wasn't bad either.

The special effects are pretty awful. I'm sure Ida's head remained firmly attached to her neck with no visible injury for a few seconds after she was beheaded. It doesn't render the film unwatchable, if anything it adds a comical element to it.

Conclusion:

I think the genre horror is pretty unjustified since you don't see much 'gore' or horror, any you do is naff special effects.

Regardless of the cliches and bad special effects, the film is truly warped and somewhat gripping. All in all it's not a bad film. 

Would I recommend it?

If it was on TV one night I'd recommend watching it, I don't think I'd go out of my way to buy it though.

It's difficult to know where to start with a film like Timber Falls; whether with the painfully average camerawork, the cliché-riddled plot or the pervasive stench of a badly-implemented budget horror movie, it makes no difference.

Timber Falls is like Wrong Turn, yet somehow worse, if such a thing were possible. The story failed to keep a hold on my attention and interest (like Wrong Turn,) and had all the uneasy unbelievability of Severance, though mercifully without Danny Dyer's cancerous presence.

Perhaps the worst thing about Timber Falls is its feeble attempt at being more than it is; it has the feel - at least for me - that the director was attempting to produce a high-end movie on a low-end budget with barely capable actors.

I would definitely recommend this film, but only if you're in the mood for wasting a fair chunk of your life on a regurgitated textbook plot and 90s-style CGI that further stagnates the already acrid feel of the film.

Now what are my thoughts on the movie? 

Within the opening moments of the film, I lost faith in it. I mean, opening with a torture scene? That is an obvious indicator for how it means to go on & I'm really not into the whole torture porn genre of cinema but worst of all, we know this is a horror movie going in but there could have still been some impact if the opening part of the movie was dedicated simply to an idyllic retreat into the wilderness for two lovers, then get to the gore and torture. By having the gore and torture at the beginning, it makes all the scenes of the couple hiking just feel like nothing but filler and just leaves us waiting for the 'proper' movie to start. 

Okay, I'll give the movie this much, for a film that relies almost completely on clichés to move the story along, it does a pretty good job of setting up things like foreshadowing and stuff to the point where it seems to actually be trying to construct an actual narrative, rather than just string a load of clichés together under a theme and call it finished. That being said, a large amount of the movie rests on contrivances too. So I still can't really call this film well written.

Also despite the shitty special effects, most of the violence in this movie did leave me gritting my teeth and clenching my toes. So I guess I can give the movie that much too but the movie ruins this too, in places the gore is gritty and realistic, well as much as it can be with these crappy special effects but other times the gore is done so cartoony I swear I'm in an anime.

As ridiculous and stupid the whole plot of this film is, the thing that really broke the experience for me was when the two 'heroes' of the piece just suddenly become cold blooded killers. I mean I don't mind it in horror films if the hero kills, even if they aren't like zombie hunters, they could be struggling with said bad and kill them by accident somehow but here they shoot one of them in the face with a shotgun, beat the other with a shovel and cut off her head and set the last one on fire turning it more into a cartoonish revenge movie, I mean sure it was badass, but broke the experience for me - no matter the horrors that were done to them, although in the end more was threatened that done, normal people don't act like this.

So do I recommend this? It's clichéd, contrived, badly written and has shitty special effects but would I say I disliked this film? No. Would I say I liked this film? No. I mean it isn't horrible, it doesn't fill me with rage. It's just, okay, neither bad or good to any real degree, despite all the faults it has, it is just average. So I can't really recommend it, but you could do worse if you have two hours to fill. Maybe Rogue River was a knock off, but it was still a better film than this was. 

Think About It!

-Locke