Director – Shawn Burkett, Screenplay – Shawn Burkett & Cheyenne Gordon, Producers – Brittany Blanton, Shawn Burkett, Rob Collins, Scott Gillespie, Stephen J. Hodke, Andrew Moore, Ryan Stacy & Travis Wilson, Photography – Shawn Burkett & Travis Wilson, Music – Rocky Gray, Visual Effects – Philip Mangano & Andrew Moore, Special Effects – Taintbad Productions (Blaze Bolden, Rob Collins & Stephen J. Hodke). Production Company – Concept Media Films/Taintbad ProRising Fire Films LLC/Studio 605 – Concept Media Films/Taintbad Productions/Rising Fire Films/Studio 605/A Head on a Stick Productions.
Cast
Cheyenne Gordon (Gil Ross), Brittany Blanton (Jane), Kenzie Phillips (Tasha), Nessa Moore (Vanessa Hemsgrove), Alex Gottmann (Charlie), Mark Justice (Mason), Kaylee Williams (Courtney), Kayla Elizabeth (Miley), Jason Crowe (Will), Tom Komisar (Sheriff Bowman), Julie Anne Prescott (Nicole), Cara McConnell (Harper)
Plot
A group of counsellors arrive to help renovate and clean up the Pine Hills Summer Camp. They discover that the handyman Gil is an ex-con. Throughout the course of the partying, some of the group go missing. They then return taken over by parasitic organisms that drive them to attack the others and pass on the parasite. Those remaining are forced into a fierce siege.
Don’t Fuck in the Woods (2016) was a modest variant on the Slasher Film. One suspected its appeal came in large part due to an attention-grabbing title. However, in between its ready appeal to the ‘fuck’ part of the title (ie. plentiful toplessness), it did engage in some modest deconstruction of the genre.
Here the first film’s director Shawn Burkett does the most natural of things and makes a sequel. Brittany Blanton, the survivor from the first film, turns up in md-film to make a connection between the two. Burkett takes the sequel back more in the direction of the 80s slasher film and gives us the archetypal setting of a summer camp. Unlike the first film, this is much more of a film about Parasites and Body Snatchers with assorted people being taken over. This takes the film away from any longer being able to be considered a slasher film, which dealt with masked maniacs of the mostly-mundane variety, and into a different genre niche.
A gore-drenched Cheyenne Gordon and Brittany Blanton
On the other hand, while the first film had a level of genre deconstruction/deflation that made it interesting, that is missing by the time of Don’t Fuck in the Woods 2. All we have is a slasher film by the numbers. All of the girls in the cast get topless at various points, while there are more scenes where the guys sit around and make crude comments. There are plentiful gory deaths (and some better makeup effects than the first film), but not much more than that.
Shawn Burkett had previously made the feature-length micro-budgeted horror films The Sleeping Soul (2012), Bludgeon (2013) and Betsy (2018), as well as produced and contributed episodes to multi-director anthologies such as Watch This (2013), Season’s Greetings (2015) and 60 Seconds to Die (2016).
