Best movie of this year hands down!

People are voting emotionally.

I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Hidden in the Woods is a film that is based on true events, though this is extremely hard to believe given the gruesome content and nature of the film throughout. Within the interview that is included in the 8-page collectible booklet, the director claims the film is 70% accurate to the true events and the other 30% is his own vision. Regardless, Hidden in the Woods will keep you at the edge of your seat for the whole 98 minute run time and leave the story and some images burned in your mind forever.The movie follows a couple of sisters and their brother who had escaped from their father, Felipe, who was a drug dealer. Throughout the years, Felipe had abused the girls and brother and subjected them to monstrous atrocities that you only read about in books. Their brother, Manuel, is deformed and had only been fed an all meat diet while he was locked in a shed. After escaping from their father, the girls and their brother all go to a cabin deep within the woods where Felipe used to keep his drugs. It is in this cabin the viewer is treated to a scene where the family cannibalizes a couple of hikers, who were up to no good, after they tried to attack one of the women. We see dismemberment, blood, gore, guts, and just about everything you can imagine. The special effects in this part of the film were very well done and made the scene seen believable.A man named, Costello, is the leader of a drug gang and he wants Felipe's drugs, so he decides to get other members of his gang to find the girls and torture them until they reveal where the drugs are hidden. Some members of the drug gang finally find the cabin with the girls in it and start to torture them asking where the drugs are; however, they have no clue. After some more blood flies, the girls and Manuel manage to escape into the woods. The remaining two members of the drug gang go out to find them and kill them. This chase sequence is very well done and so intense, it had the palms of my hands sweating and hoping the girls would get away. Eventually, we are brought to the very final scene of the movie. The final scene is so disturbing and so bloody, at times, I had to look away. I kept telling myself, "It's only special effects.", but it was so well done, it almost seemed like reality.I don't want to reveal too much of this movie in this review, hence, why I'm a bit vague on a few things because there are a couple of twists in the story at the end. Overall, this movie was sick, disgusting, gory, and extremely bloody, but I liked it. It was very well done and the story line was very believable, obviously, because it was mostly true. Hidden in the Woods is a movie that I recommend almost any Horror fan to watch as it's a story of survival and revenge at its most extreme. Overall, I give Hidden in the Woods a 5/5 stars. It's definitely worth buying and keeping in your collection as you may want to watch it multiple times.Overall rating: 5/5 stars, or in this case 10/10.Special Features:Interview with Director Patricio Valladares, 8-Page Collectible Booklet, Behind the Scenes Featurette, Artsploitation Trailers

This Chile flick has made some impression to Michael Biehn. He wants to do a remake about this brutal flick that is so-called based on true events.This flick is shown at a lot of horror conventions or festivals but seeing it I can't really say that it is a horror. It isn't even a revenge flick but a pure survival flick. It do has a few nasty and brutal moments were the red stuff is flying around but you will not be amused to see it due the brutality.This flick opens with a man killing a woman who appears to be his wife. His two sisters are raised in the woods by their father but he abuses them and rapes them throughout their teens. Of course one got pregnant but having no money the baby is raised with meat. A retarded is raised. The only way to survive is selling drugs but one sudden moment things go wrong and the father is jailed. The sisters ran away with the retard and are trying to survive and not being captured by the drug dealers. It's from there that it rather has some nasty things to offer like when two hikers are in the woods and seeing one of the girls naked they are out to rape her again. But she has a secret, cannibalism. Not your typical story with one of the sisters becoming a hooker and going for blow jobs one after each other. The final is maybe a bit of revenge but it's a blood bath galore. If you think that this is a normal flick about drugs forget it. This is pure exploitation were I admit the story isn't always correct, the chainsaw scene will proof that. Two guns against a chainsaw and the chainsaw wins....Nevertheless. I enjoyed it and the subs worked out fine. But again, not for everybody, surely a lot of horror geeks will stop it after a while but exploitation buffs will adore it.Gore 2,5/5 Nudity 1,5/5 Effects 3/5 Story 3/5 Comedy 0/5

It seems like the US will remake anything these days. I almost wish they use the subtitles from this movie for their script. Actually better not, because one comedy is enough. It's also what the director said before the screening started. He didn't see it as grim, but more as a fun movie. There's a different view on things. Unless those mentioned subtitles were not an accident, but supposed to sound ridiculous.But it's not only those things that are more than weird. It's the story too. The main villainous guy is kinda funny, but underused. The father (a person of mixed morality, if you're being nice to the character) is plain bad and the girls don't seem to be able to act, if their lives depended on it (which coincidently it does).The other reviewer (up to this point) must have been to another screening at Frightfest. Or was it another dimension? I couldn't tell, but I only heard negative feedback to this movie (apart from the woman that really asked that question at the Q&A but got the "appropriate" reaction from the crowd -> laughter and disbelief). I almost envy this person and wish I was there to experience the movie he has seen. It sounds great ... unfortunately the one I watched, wasn't.

HIDDEN IN THE WOODS/ EN LAS AFUERAS DE LA CIUDAD (2012 Spanish Language Version)This film was a Grimm-like fairytale horror-crime story with a big nasty injection of wicked humour. It's no surprise Hollywood has already snapped up a remake from the original director (currently in development).Hidden in the Woods earned a long round of applause at its Frightfest 2012 screening. A cross between Lucky McKee's The Woman, Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn (without the vampires!), it featured lush and vibrant cinematography of Chilean locations and a pounding country/blues-rock score mixed in with gorgeous, atmospheric piano and appropriately synthy gloom. Ominous sound effects also punctuated the action, in the best Lynchian tradition.The men were scumbags, drug dealers and earned delicious revenge at the hands and teeth of the two sisters who had been kept captive since birth by their brutal father, himself at the mercy of the local drug baron who, in the film's climax, comes looking for them all, and the missing stash of drugs. The dad had allowed the local crimelord (with white twirly beard and luxury villa and two daughters kept in comfort and wealth, compared to the lives of the family we follow whose lives he has ruined) to rape his own wife and possibly his daughters too (something the dad himself was also prone to attempting, in scenes that were not shown in any detail). The rape scenes here were the cause of some controversy at Frightfest, understandably, and they are upsetting but brief, shot frenziedly and not lingering at all. I also felt they had purpose within the plot to create this montrous father figure, demonising him to the extent that the eventual revenge felt all the more sweet. But they were hard scenes to get through, and less sanitised -rightly - than Hollywood's usual salacious version of the same awful crime.The Dad; the monster - all hairy of body and thick of muscle, was the 'ogre under the bridge', with his two daughters' 'trip, trip, tripping footprints' above - the beast that could burrow out of soil with his bare hands. The best movie monster since Karloff did Frankenstein. Regarding accusations of misogyny from some critics towards the film, I can only report back that the usherette I sat next to (I was on the aisle seat, she was perched on the stairs.. at least I hope she was an usherette and not something more sinister) munched sweets and chuckled throughout the screening (actually, beginning to think she was definitely something more sinister now!) and there was also a question from a young female fan at the Q&A after the movie to the director that started with her saying how much she loved the movie and the bloody ending (that was very reminiscent of a sprawled Tim Roth from Reservoir Dogs, with most of the cast writhing on a slick of their own blood on the tiled floor of the local drug baron's villa while shooting at each other at close range) and even said she found the film 'sexy' - well, the scene between one of the daughters and the married man in the motel room was a rare moment of fairly consensual steaminess and the two girls did ooze a certain sexuality when chasing through the jungle after the poor henchmen of the local drug baron who didn't know what was about to hit them between the legs! Within the Woods was an unnerving, unexpected, vibrant, hip, very bloody, gun-toting, great-Grimm fairy tale of a gangster movie with horror edging, that I think will result in more head-swirling films from this young director, Patricio Valladares - who is clearly a real, unpredictable talent to witness and wait for.Valladares hinted at Frightfest that future films will be more crime based, less horror. Which is (when you take away such dreamlike, surreal additions as the feral cannibal brother kept locked up in a room by Dad and released by the sisters) what this film is at heart; a really quite brutal but sly crime movie in a heady, nightmarish, adult fairytale setting. It's a genre all to itself. It's what a Frightfest film should be.mark gordon palmer