It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Karen (Christine Noonan), the female protagonist from backwoods slasher Geek, has got to be one of the most irritating horror movie heroines I've ever seen, totally deserving of the suffering she endures: she completely ignores a helpful park ranger's advice by choosing to camp in an area shunned by locals (they're not going there for a reason, you silly bint!); she refuses to listen to reason from her boyfriend Jamie (Brad Armacost), forcing him to accept an invitation to dinner from redneck Eben (Dick Kreusser), despite the fact that, moments earlier, he had held a loaded shotgun to Jamie's head; she skinny dips alone at a remote lake, without questioning the wisdom of such an act; and she not only insists that Jamie goes 'coon hunting with Eben, leaving herself at the mercy of Eben's drooling retard of a son William, but she decides that then would be a good time to strip off, giving William an eyeful of her nekkid bod.William, whose hobby is biting the heads off small critters (especially chickens), rather unsurprisingly wigs out at the sight of Karen's tatas, and tries to attack her, at which point the film offers up some reasonable thrills followed by a neat finale in which Karen sets up a nasty trap involving fish-hooks and a bag full of rocks. Unfortunately, this comes very late in the day, after lots of dull wandering around the woods, and a drawn out scene in Eben's cabin in which Jamie and his hillbilly host get drunk on moonshine. If it wasn't for Karen's occasional nudity to alleviate the boredom, getting to the (unbelievably silly) end of Geek would be tougher than a three day hike through the backwoods of Kentucky.3.5 out of 10, rounded up to 4 for IMDb.

"Backwoods", or "Geek" (as I know it) is one of those films in the same sub-genre as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deliverance, Midnight, Just Before Dawn...you get my drift. It reminded me very much of "Just Before Dawn", as some of the scenes are very similar.I won't go into a detailed description of the plot as I'm sure you will get an idea of it from the other reviews here.The film gets off to a slow start, although the atmosphere is rather creepy. There is very little gore at all, which is a shame because it would have enhanced things greatly. When things do get going (in the last quarter of the film) is when it is most rewarding - the scenes are tense, disturbing and very well done. The film also makes you think a bit and by the end, the message I got was that ultimately humans stand alone and must protect themselves at all costs.If you love films such as Just Before Dawn, Midnight, Deliverance, and so on, I would recommend giving this a watch. The pay-off is in the ending but sadly you have to suffer a bit of boredom to get to it.

I have to admit that this fascinatingly awful movie (the version we screened was the US release, BACKWOODS) was actually quite watchable, the most amusing aspect being that one of the peanut gallery here remarked that it was better than DELIVERANCE because it had four scenes female nudity instead of Ned Beatty getting punked. "What EVER, dude" was all I could manage as a reply.THE PLOT: An annoying young urbanite cutesy yuppie liberal couple sets off for a biking/hiking tour of the Kentucky mountains (with their doctor's bag & some sort of game about telling people they are brother/sister, which is kind of kinky to say the least) and promptly wind up enjoying supper with a backwoods cracker who makes his own moonshine, carries a breech loader shotgun everywhere and thinks he's Tom Waits, growling out the movie's theme "song" with the same kind of gusto. Seems ole' Eben has had a spate of bad luck at his stereotypical cracker/hick/hillbilly chicken farm, losing his wife to tragedy, having his son suffer a developmentally disabling accident and his daughter breaking her neck, oops. The yuppies are too polite to tell the cracker to go punt off and hang around long enough for William the Geek to decide he likes the purdy lady's hair more than biting the heads off the mechanical chickens credited in the film's closing reel of talent names (there's a resume I'd like to read -- "Responsible for the mechanical chicken effects on Dean Crow's BACKWOODS, 1987").William predictably runs amok, Eben conveniently dies, the annoying doctor boyfriend inexplicably disappears, there is a showdown of survival skills that our pretty heroine wins by default for just having seen a couple episodes of "MacGuyver" or "The Fishin' Musician", perhaps both, and the inconclusive twist ending (now how does the guy end up in the Geek Shack, again??) is just infuriating enough to make you forget that eighty nine minutes of pretty much nothing have just idled by, but gosh darnit it wasn't boring once you get down to brass tacks. There is indeed abundant female nudity (though star Ms. Noonan's film career begins and ends with this epic tale, too bad because she had some spunk to her & a non-traditional feminine beauty that is hard to deny when she's all naked like that), it's always fun + politically acceptable to laugh at stupid white redneck trash haha, and ole' Eben can spin a mighty interesting story when he's tossing back a mason jar of real Mountain Dew. All he needs is some guy with an accordion and he could go on tour with a Tom Waits revival band.I guess that's the movie's big insight: The term "Mountain Dew" was originally hillbilly slang for moonshine before becoming the name for a disgusting soft drink I'll never be able to ingest again without thinking of this movie. Beyond that, a great line about how "Women in these parts warm the bed", and some hints as to how to make a death trap out of fishing hooks (plus bring some nice take-out when staying at a hillbilly chicken farm overnight) the movie doesn't seem to have had a real artistic need to have been made, raising the interesting question of what the point of it is :-) . We don't learn anything about the people involved and since William the Geek is a slavering sub-human rather than an evil villain ala the guys in DELIVERANCE the film comes down to a behavior study -- Here is how yuppies behave when on vacation, here is how hillbillies behave when the have company over for dinner, and here is how geeks behave when purdy ladies start getting undressed on the front lawn & going for ill-advised but fun to watch naked swims. That the movie is well made and doesn't try to accomplish more than it's budget allowed is more impressive than anything depicted on screen; Here is a stupid exploitation film that knows it's place, nice and safely tucked away down in the gutter for anybody who wants a peek, the rest of us can just go about our lives without missing anything too novel. And that's what a Geek Show is once you think about it. How fitting!4/10

It's a shame that this lovely site doesn't feature a poster image of this 'Geek', a.k.a Backwoods. The VHS copy I rented showed a mad-raving freak, waving around a butcher's hatchet. It attracts horror lovers and, in all honesty, I have to admit that the cover motivated me to rent it without knowing anything about it. Big mistake, of course! Backwoods stands as one of the lousiest pieces of trash I ever beheld…and that does mean something! This film is a bloodless 80's slasher and that's about the worst idea possible. The makers clearly intended to bring tension and dept instead of blood and gore but they failed miserably. After an hour of viewing, you still haven't seen any of the cast-members dying (unless you think decapitated chickens are gruesome). What other reasons do you have for seeing a slasher besides teen-butchering??? The heart-breaking story about a lone Kentucky farmer and his deranged son? The thrilling adventures of a young couple camping? The only aspect worth mentioning is the eerie opening/end credits song. The slowly sung and chilling lyrics give you the wrong impression that you're about to watch a good film. Check out 'Deliverance', 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre', 'Just before Dawn', 'The Hills have Eyes' or even Rick Roessler's 'Slaughterhouse' instead! Anything but this turkey!