After the unexpected suicide of a college buddy, a group of childhood friends take off to the Black Forest in the Wisconsin wilderness. There's douchebag Brent - known as "The Brent" - (Josh Mijal), unconvincing jock Cooper (Travis Ruhland) and bi-curious ex-soldier Paul (Dwight McMillan), nice girl Jessica (Angela Lowe), slut Becky (Amy Quinn), and arty social reject Mark (Jesse L. Cyr). Not deterred by stories of recent disappearances in the area, nor the discovery of ripped-apart bodies, the group rent a remote cabin for the weekend. While various locals are getting their faces ripped off and their hearts ripped out by local Bigfoot-type urban legend "The Black Hodag", Becky is sleeping around and intimating her interest in Mark who has a crush on Jessica who is unhappy with crass boyfriend Brent while Paul is the butt of sexually-ambiguous sight gags and Cooper cares more about drinking and listening to the game than the fact that someone has cut the phone lines, slash the tires, and left one of their number hanging from a tree with a sickle in his chest.

Described by press materials as "a shamelessly entertaining throwback to the non-PC horror movies of the early eighties" and by the director himself as "American Pie in the woods, where the pie eats the kids" BACKWOODS BLOODBATH really isn't that much of either. The weaknesses of BACKWOODS BLOODBATH are not unlikable, unsympathetic characters (two of the characters are designated onscreen as 'douchebags') but weak, unconvincing performances, bad rock music slathered over the soundtrack (sometimes burying dialogue), a cliché-ridden but unconvincingly rendered backwoods setting, a lack of even attempted suspense (leavened by the subsequent gore), odd tone shifts, behavior that is uneven and stupid even by eighties slasher standards, and predictable, sophomoric humor that ALWAYS falls flat. The gore, on the other hand, is over-the-top and heaped on with gusto; as such, things really pick up during the stalk-and-disembowel climax (which also gains some novelty from an unexpected third act twist which might have been more predictable in any other slasher film) although the director is audience-savvy enough to spread several more gory kills throughout the uneven first half.