An eerie mixture of psychological character study and thriller, with a smattering of gender politics thrown in for good measure, the micro-budget indie Wilderness Survival for Girls (2004) begins like so many tales set in the woods, with a ghost story. Enjoying some fleeting time together before two of them head off to college, three 17-year-old girls spend the weekend in a remote Colorado mountain cabin. After a day of drinking beer, hiking, sunbathing and some arguing too, they settle in for a scary tale. Seated around a fire after dinner, the three friends discuss the crime that kept them away from this remote parcel of the Colorado Rockies for so long.
Decades before, Deb (Megan Henning) and Ruth's (Jeanette Brox) babysitters were brutally murdered in the same wilderness. They recount the crime to Kate (Ali Humiston), a crime the Wilderness Survival for Girls based on an actual 1976 double murder.
Polite and subservient, Ruth is the good girl whose parents own the cabin and have apparently loosened the reigns on this sheltered girl for a weekend trip. Deb is her smart, more jaded college-bound friend and Kate , who will not attend college in the Fall, is the punk rock tough girl with a chip on her shoulder.
But their solitude is soon disrupted by a frightening middle-aged drifter Edward (James Morrison) who appears outside their remote cabin. He asks for the gun they have found in the cabin, along with the fox carcass he has left in the freezer and makes it clear he has been secretly living there for some time. He refuses to leave and his intentions are unclear. Does he plan to hurt the girls? Is he linked to the 1976 murders? Or is he just a man who has been living in isolation in the mountain cabin, caught in the trio's increasing suspicion fueled by pot and their true crime ghost story?
Gaining momentary control of the situation, the girls turn the gun on Edward. They tie him to a chair and appear to hold the upper hand. But when Kate and Deb leave the cabin in search of help, the dynamic changes. Left to her own devices, Ruth begins to act increasingly erratically, suggesting a sexual attraction to Edward. In the film's surprising denouement the three girls see how far their fear and anger can push them.
Shooting in 18 days the husband and wife directing team of directors Eli B. Despres and Kim Roberts shot Wilderness Survival for Girls in just 18 days. Though the settings are basic, limited to mountain cabins and the surrounding forest, it is the unique psychological tension that distinguishes this indie feature from the usual girls-in-trouble slasher film. Despres and Roberts generate a queasy tension with the possibility of murder or sexual assault always hanging in the air but then hinge their plot on surprising choices. To that already intense brew, writers/directors Despres and Roberts add some interesting class tension between upper class Deb and Ruth and their socioeconomic lesser Kate, a tension which Edward also seems willing to exploit.
FF: This film felt to me like The Blair Witch Project (1999) crossed with a girl-centric indie by Karen Moncrieff (The Dead Girl, 2006; Blue Car, 2002) with a touch of Roman Polanski's Knife on the Water (1962). It's a very different take on the teen slasher film one would expect in this setting. What films did it remind you of?
BW: The title made me think it was going to be a cross between a Girl Scout manual and a Troma film. Fortunately, it was neither. To me, it was a brainy response to the current trend toward "Torture Porn" (Saw, Hostel, Captivity), but without the jiggling hand-held camera, prosthetic gore effects and contempt for humanity. Wilderness Survival never played to the lowest common denominator, and actually challenges viewers to think about what they are watching. It was refreshing that good and evil were not so clearly defined. We (and the characters) never really know if Edward is there to harm the girls or has just stumbled into the middle of a bad high (the three high-schoolers are in the midst of pot-fueled paranoia when Edward intrudes). Speaking of which, the marijuana-smoking scene was pretty hokey -- I couldn't tell if it was a conscious throwback to the anti-drug classroom films of the '70s or if they actually thought using a fisheye lens conveyed the sensation of being high.
FF: One thing I appreciated about the film was its unusual take on female sexuality which emerged in surprising ways, and from characters you didn't expect it of, like brainy Ruth who at one point seems willing to let her possibly murderous captive seduce her. It is a horror convention, of course, to see female sexuality as some provocative bait laid for a serial killer or monster, but here it was more in the hands of these girls and much more complicated.
BW: Female sexuality was like the shotgun one of the girls brings out of a bedroom and starts waving around. One girl finds it frightening and wants it hidden away, and one finds it empowering, and wants to get it out and play with it. Either way, you get a sense that to them, this gun (their sex) is something new and fascinating, and none of them has yet to understand its complexities. The gun, the spooky mountain cottage and the male intruder are terrific devices to bring Ruth, Deb and Kate's latent sexual fears and desires to the surface.
FF: I think what distinguishes so many interesting independent films - and exploitation films too - is how well they employ their limited resources and cleverly use smaller budgets. A huge budget can often limit directors in what they are willing to do and comes with its own obstacles to overcome. There are so many examples of amazing directors of small films who make lousy transitions to big-budget Hollywood fare because they lose sight of plot and character. In the case of Wilderness Survival for Girls paring everything down to three girls at a crossroads in their lives and a mysterious stranger with unclear motives shows the beauty of simplicity. The writing and some solid acting, especially from James Morrison, propel things in a genre where clichs and special effects are more often the standard.
BW: I tend to not listen to director commentaries but in this case I found Despres and Roberts's audio track very enlightening. It reveals just how small a production Wilderness Survival was (in terms of budget and crew size), and how resourceful the filmmakers were in creating a good-looking, effective film on such a shoestring.
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by Bret Wood & Felicia Feaster
