Director – Marcel Walz, Screenplay – Mario Van von Czapiewski, Producer – Ruediger W. Kuemmerle, Photography – Thomas Rist, Music – Klaus Pfreunder, Visual Effects Supervisor – Manuel Urbaneck, Special Effects Supervisor – Kwame Head, Production Design – Joe Quintanilla & Marcel Walz. Production Company – Silent Partners.
Cast
Elissa Dowling (Jessica), Tyler Gallant (William), Sarah French (Erin), Felissa Rose (Laura Benott), Brandon Rhea (Dominic Braun), Tiffani Fest (Brenda), Kwame Head (Roger Winston)
Plot
Horror podcast hosts Jessica and William are hired by film producer Laura Benott to make a documentary about the legendary Wood Devil that haunts California’s Rootwood Forest. Joined by their friend Erin, they set out to in a camper van armed with cameras and try to find evidence of the Wood Devil.
Marcel Walz is a German director who has made a string of mostly low-budget and not always widely seen horror films. These include the likes of Camp Corpses (2006), Cadaver (2007), Road Rip (2007), Tortura (2008), Hacked to Pieces (2009), Le Petit Mort (2009), Avantgarde (2010), Popular (2010), Candy House (2011), Plastic Surgery Massacre (2012), Raw: The Curse of Grete Muller (2013), Seed 2 (2014), The Diary of Grete Muller (2014), Le Petit Mort II (2014), The Revelation of Grete Muller (2015), Blind (2019) and Pretty Boy (2021). Walz’s most high-profile film was the remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast (2016).
Rootwood is essentially a variant on The Blair Witch Project (1999) where a trio of people go wandering in the woods with cameras in search of a mythical creature and spooky things happen. The film repeats all the basics of Blair Witch except for one major difference – it is not shot as a Found Footage film. There are occasional camera point-of-view scenes but for the most part everything is shot in regular third-person camerawork, which seems surprising given the amount of camera equipment the group take into the woods with them.
The big killer of the film is that hardly anything happens. There is the set-up regarding the legend of the Wood Devil but then nothing happens regarding it as you might expect – at most something creeping outside the camper van window, or a bloodied hangman’s noose that keeps turning up. That’s it for the entire film until just about the end. The film has a fairly brief 73 minute runtime but it still drags.
(l to r) Tyler Gallant, Elissa Dowling and Sarah French venture in search of the Wood Devil
The film is made with essentially a three-person cast. This consists of Elissa Dowling, an actress who has floated around B movie parts since the early 2000s, along with a couple of other lesser-known actors. The surprise name among the cast is that of Felissa Rose, who appears in two scenes, one at the start and one at the end, as the producer who hires the trio to go on their quest into the woods. Rose is the actress who made a memorable appearance as the transgender killer in Sleepaway Camp (1983) and since the 2000s has maintained a career on the convention circuit and in playing B movie parts.
The characters have a snappy rapport that is a little more rounded than you get in these films. This is also a Blair Witch copy where the trio are genre savvy – they come from a background running a horror podcast and Tyler Gallant goes the whole way through the film wearing a t-shirt with the names of Karloff, Price, Lugosi and Lee on it, plus others.
On the other hand, the film comes to a ridiculous twist ending that makes no real sense at all where [PLOT SPOILERS] a Wood Devil appears in the last few minutes and abducts Elissa Dowling where it is revealed that all of this has been a set-up for producer Felissa Rose. Elissa is taken back to the studio where her demise is to be filmed only for a completely ridiculous twist where they interrupted as the real Wood Devil breaks in.
