Trees is set in the small Vermont town of Hazelville in the US where forest Ranger Mark Cody (Kevin McCauley) gets a phone-call to inform him that a teenage girl is missing in his forest, eventually Cody & his Rangers find her mutilated remains. At first the coroner confirms it was a Tree attack but after local mayor Swindell (Raymond Michaud) puts the pressure on the coroner changes their mind & puts it down to a lawnmower accident, Cody calls in Tree expert Max Cooper (Phil Gardiner) & he feels a Great White Pine is loose in the forest killing anyone it comes across. With memorial day weekend fast approaching the mayor doesn't want any bad publicity that might harm the town's tourism business but Cody & Cooper are convinced more innocent campers & hikers will die at the leaves of the killer Tree & set out to cut it down to size...
Set decoration, production design, co-casting, co-edited, co-executive produced, written & directed by Michael Pleckaitis who also gets credits for special effects, carpentry & sound effects this is essentially a rather bland parody of Jaws (1975) with silly killer Trees instead of a Great White Shark, if it sounds stupid to you then don't worry because it is. The entire plot of Trees is an exact copy of Jaws as the forest replaces the ocean, a killer Tree replaces the Shark, campers replace tourists, there's the town mayor who doesn't want any bad publicity, there's the kid that gets killed & the angry mother, Cooper the Tree expert is here instead of the Shark expert in Jaws, amateur hunters kill a Tree & the two leads open it up to discover no human body parts, the final confrontation features kegs on chains & an explosive end for the Tree menace while the hardened old hunter goes from Quint the Shark killer to Squint the lumberjack who even gets to tell an old story about how his war mates were massacred by a killer Tree. Obviously not taking itself seriously Trees has an outrageous concept & is very silly but it's main downfall is that it's simply not funny in the slightest & while trying to send-up a genuine classic comes across as a very, very poor relation. Virtually every scene or line of dialogue is a homage or rip-off (whichever way you look at it) of Jaws in some way, to be brutally honest you would be much better off just watching Jaws again. At a shade over 85 minutes in length Trees might have worked better as an hour long short rather than a full blown feature film as the material goes stale very, very quickly. There's just not enough here to sustain an entire film, as I said the entire plot follows Jaws almost exactly so it's utterly predictable & the only laughs come from whether you find the idea of a killer Tree funny or not. Which I didn't.
Besides Jaws this film also references a few other's like the eating game from Cool Hand Luke (1967) & The Blair Witch Project (1999) after a film can labelled 'Witch Project' is found inside a Tree in what I thought was the films single most amusing moment. Obviously shot on a tiny budget there are no special effects to speak of, there's a severed leg & a moving Tree but nothing else, the moving Tree looks pretty bad like it's just some production crew member with branches stuck on them running around. Stick around for the end credits as they feature lots of bloopers & mistakes as actor's get their lines wrong or the cameraman falls over while running through the woods. Even though I have seen the sequel Trees 2: The Root of All Evil (2004) because my review of it is on the IMDb I cannot remember a single thing about it although I also gave that three stars so I couldn't have liked it that much.
Shot entirely on digital video Trees looks cheap, it looks like the sort of film you would make with a camcorder from the 90's. Filmed in Connecticut. The acting is poor, I am sure Kevin McCauley got the lead role because of his resemblance to Roy Scheider.
Trees is basically a camp comedy send-up of Jaws, the main problem as I saw it was that Trees just isn't funny in the slightest & the one note joke gets old & tiresome very fast. They even shamelessly rip-off the classic line 'we're going to need a bigger boat' with 'we're going to need a bigger axe', if that sounds funny to you then you might like Trees & if it doesn't you probably, like me, won't.
Set decoration, production design, co-casting, co-edited, co-executive produced, written & directed by Michael Pleckaitis who also gets credits for special effects, carpentry & sound effects this is essentially a rather bland parody of Jaws (1975) with silly killer Trees instead of a Great White Shark, if it sounds stupid to you then don't worry because it is. The entire plot of Trees is an exact copy of Jaws as the forest replaces the ocean, a killer Tree replaces the Shark, campers replace tourists, there's the town mayor who doesn't want any bad publicity, there's the kid that gets killed & the angry mother, Cooper the Tree expert is here instead of the Shark expert in Jaws, amateur hunters kill a Tree & the two leads open it up to discover no human body parts, the final confrontation features kegs on chains & an explosive end for the Tree menace while the hardened old hunter goes from Quint the Shark killer to Squint the lumberjack who even gets to tell an old story about how his war mates were massacred by a killer Tree. Obviously not taking itself seriously Trees has an outrageous concept & is very silly but it's main downfall is that it's simply not funny in the slightest & while trying to send-up a genuine classic comes across as a very, very poor relation. Virtually every scene or line of dialogue is a homage or rip-off (whichever way you look at it) of Jaws in some way, to be brutally honest you would be much better off just watching Jaws again. At a shade over 85 minutes in length Trees might have worked better as an hour long short rather than a full blown feature film as the material goes stale very, very quickly. There's just not enough here to sustain an entire film, as I said the entire plot follows Jaws almost exactly so it's utterly predictable & the only laughs come from whether you find the idea of a killer Tree funny or not. Which I didn't.
Besides Jaws this film also references a few other's like the eating game from Cool Hand Luke (1967) & The Blair Witch Project (1999) after a film can labelled 'Witch Project' is found inside a Tree in what I thought was the films single most amusing moment. Obviously shot on a tiny budget there are no special effects to speak of, there's a severed leg & a moving Tree but nothing else, the moving Tree looks pretty bad like it's just some production crew member with branches stuck on them running around. Stick around for the end credits as they feature lots of bloopers & mistakes as actor's get their lines wrong or the cameraman falls over while running through the woods. Even though I have seen the sequel Trees 2: The Root of All Evil (2004) because my review of it is on the IMDb I cannot remember a single thing about it although I also gave that three stars so I couldn't have liked it that much.
Shot entirely on digital video Trees looks cheap, it looks like the sort of film you would make with a camcorder from the 90's. Filmed in Connecticut. The acting is poor, I am sure Kevin McCauley got the lead role because of his resemblance to Roy Scheider.
Trees is basically a camp comedy send-up of Jaws, the main problem as I saw it was that Trees just isn't funny in the slightest & the one note joke gets old & tiresome very fast. They even shamelessly rip-off the classic line 'we're going to need a bigger boat' with 'we're going to need a bigger axe', if that sounds funny to you then you might like Trees & if it doesn't you probably, like me, won't.