FILM REVIEW: Panteon Woods – ‘Shows Potential, But Not Much Else’

Panteon Woods is a lost-in-the-forest found footage flick. If that sounds familiar, well, there’s certainly good reason for that: these movies can be made cheaply, so there’s a lot of them. Simply mentioning found footage is enough to turn some people off. But I’m always interested in whether a director can offer a new spin on the sub-genre. Panteon Woods does indeed offer something new, though the film is a mess in almost every way except technically.

Writer/director Michael Ramova is one of those people who insist on doing almost everything himself. Who knows whether this decision is because of necessity or preference, though I tend to suspect it’s the latter. I also suspect there was virtually nobody around to tell Ramova that some of his ideas were just plain bad.

The setup is pretty typical horror movie fare. Two sisters, Riley (Heather Jane Farr) and Rebecca (Nixon Vicci), go into the woods on a cryptozoological expedition to find a local creature of legend. Riley has a YouTube channel that’s growing in popularity and Rebecca is interested in cinematography. So the two of them go into the woods in order to film their YouTube episode, and they bring along a guide, tracker, and survivalist type named Gregoy Blackrot (Richard Wotkun). He’s a Vietnam veteran who also happens to be a creeper. He’s interested in shagging the sisters, both of whom are in their early twenties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JH-goxgyvE

It’s a pretty standard plot with pretty standard B-movie acting. Actually, the acting seems worse than it is because we’re talking about a found-footage film, which requires a great deal of realism to be believable. After all, we’re basically supposed to be watching a fake documentary. It would have been a lot easier to like, even perhaps kind of love this movie if the whole found footage concept was forgotten about. The campy style of acting on display here is really not suited to the subgenre. The stilted and awkward dialogue doesn’t contribute much to a feeling of verisimilitude. I simply can’t emphasize enough how much this movie would have benefitted from an omniscient point-of-view.

There’s an interesting story at the core of Panteon Woods, especially near the end of the film (which is a relatively breezy 70 minutes), when it suddenly changes from the horror movie we thought we were watching and becomes a thriller. But the script definitely should have gone through a few more drafts, and for a movie that was so short, there was actually a lot of fat that needed to be trimmed. As it stands, that would probably have made the film a long-ish short film, but if the last act was developed further, it could still qualify as feature-length.

Ramova clearly has a passion for B-movie bloodbaths, and I definitely admire anyone who has a vision and follows it through to completion. If he develops his writing a bit more and brings on some strong below-the-line collaborators, he’ll really have something. Panteon Woods shows potential, but not much else.