Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight Parent Guide

Deep in the dark Polish forest is a camp for young adults whose parents feel that they need a break from technology. No smartphones, no tablets, no laptops. Nothing. The most exciting thing on the schedule is a three-day hike out into the woods. Camp Counselor Iza (Gabriela Muskala) leads her little group out, but come the morning of the second day, one of the campers is missing. Splitting up to go look for them, Zosia (Julia Wieniawa-Narkiewicz), Julek (Michael Lupa), and Iza soon find that the missing camper is more than missing – he’s dead. And it looks like they’ll be going the same way soon, since a terrible superhuman monster is roaming the woods with revenge on its mind…

Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight is bargain-bin Polish Friday the 13^th. It’s not subtle, either. There’s an iconic kill scene from Friday the 13^th VII which this movie shamelessly copies frame by frame. The charming little campers wandering around the woods are eerily reminiscent of the teens at Camp Crystal Lake. Based on appearances and personality traits alone, you can figure out who is going to survive and the order in which the others are going to die within the first ten minutes of the movie. If you’ve seen any other slasher movie, you’ve seen most of this one already.

As such, this is grotesquely inappropriate for younger audiences. Slasher films, as the name implies, get their entertainment from gruesome and gory murder. So unless you really want your 12-year-old watching someone being fed into a woodchipper after having their eyes gouged out, I’d recommend you keep this one for a more adults-only kind of Halloween party. Although, frankly, if you’re planning on serving snacks, I might pick something a bit less…messy. For me, my biggest irritation is the graphic sex scene between teenaged characters. There are movies that handle sex scenes between teenagers better, and the way they do that is typically by avoiding portraying teen characters naked. Call me a prude, but I don’t like seeing teenaged girls naked, even if the actress involved is clearly in her twenties.

Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight isn’t anything particularly special, but genre fans might have a good time with the over-the-top murder spree (if they don’t mind subtitles, that is). Frankly, I think even horror fans might have a better time re-watching one of their other favorites rather than sit through this subtitled re-hashing of slasher cliches. As for me, I just wish I hadn’t tried to eat my lunch while watching this. Something about graphic dismemberments just isn’t doing it for my appetite. Wonder why…