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Rockie Whore(r) Picture Show
Wilderness Survival for Girls (Eli Despres, Kim Roberts 2004)
Based in part on an actual murder from the filmmaker’s childhood, Wilderness Survival for Girls is half coming-of-age story, half psycho-thriller, half lesbian love story and seven-eighths bad judgment (the math is indicative of how this film adds up). Set in the not-so-creepy Colorado Rockies, the story revolves around three teenaged girls who’ve just graduated from high school and are primed for cattiness, boozery and the discovery of a lone woodsman who may or may not be a serial killer. The three girls are fairly archetypal: there’s Ruth (Jeanette Brox), the naïve, uptight do-gooder who lets everybody boss her around. Deb (Megan Henning) is the bookish, budding lesbian who desperately wants people to like her, particularly Kate (Ali Humiston) the cooler-than-thou Gwen Stefani wannabe who has nothing in common with either Ruth or Deb but for some reason decides to spend her summer with them, sunbathing topless and enticing them with “marijuana experimentation.” The three girls are fairly annoying, Ruth in particular, who, once left alone with the supposed serial killer (James Morrison) they find in their cabin, decides that the perfect time to teach herself how to masturbate is when a serial killer is tied to a chair in the next room. Once that plan backfires, she decides to fall in love with him. The serial killer, whose name is Ed and who they’ve tied to a chair because they don’t know what else to do with him, starts putting the moves on Ruth with lines that wouldn’t even work on Saved by the Bell, while a quintessential fire crackles in the background. Meanwhile, Deb and Kate are off snogging in another cabin, leaving Ruth to make yet another poor decision—to untie Ed so that he can more easily drink the beer she has offered him. Ed seems genuinely confused throughout most of the movie, a sweet-talking Alzheimer’s-type who continues to be chumped by the three clueless teens. How he managed to survive in the wilderness is something of an anomaly. After Kate and Deb make out a little, Kate tells Deb she’s not “that way” but takes her top off nonetheless and says, “wait, we can still do it!” when Deb realizes the folly of her ways and tries to return to Ruth.
The suspense of the film, while it had potential, is trumped by the completely unbelievable plot twists, the bad decisions made by the girls time and again and Ed’s bewildered puppy-dog expressions, which do nothing but make him appear feeble. The storyline moves like a constipated two-step, trying desperately to follow one direction but inevitably tripping over itself and the childish, would-be revelations the girls discover about themselves in the process of bringing Ed to justice. It’s never stated whether Ed was actually responsible for the deaths of the babysitters a decade earlier, but Deb and Kate can tell he did it because they looked him in the eye while asking. If the film didn’t suffer from multiple personality disorder, certain parts would have been more tolerable. There is a fairly funny scene where Ruth tries to convince Deb and Kate that she’s not stoned, but those moments are few and far between. Ultimately, like the teenaged hormones it gyrates wildly around, Wilderness Survival for Girls is all about instant gratification. The least it could’ve done was buy me a drink first…
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