The thing about finding movies on the internet to watch is that you don’t always know where the movies came from. I mean there are the usual bad rips, or hardcoded subtitles, or the audio is the wrong language type of thing to deal with, but what I’m talking about is not necessarily knowing what kind of movie you’re about to watch. Is this a prestige Hollywood movie, or some straight-to-video release? Did it have a sizeable budget or were they working on a shoestring? It if has named actors, at what point in their career was this movie made? Were they famous when they made it?

Obviously, for a lot of movies, this is almost automatically known by me. I watch a lot of movies, I pay attention to movie reviews and news. In the vast majority of the films I watch I have some idea of what I’m getting into.

But not always.

Sometimes it is a surprise. Case in point: In the Deep Woods stars Rosanne Arquette, Anthony Perkins, Will Patton, and Amy Ryan. These are people I know. These are people I like. Those last two might not be household names, but I bet you’ve seen them in something. But Arquette and Perkins were stars.

It was made in 1992 which is a little late in Perkins’s career (in fact this was his last film) and a little early for Ryan (in fact this was her first film), but Will Patton had established himself as a solid character actor and Arquette was at the height of her powers.

Not that I was paying that much attention to the date of release when I picked this movie, I saw those names and some decent reviews on Letterboxd and pressed “play.”

What I didn’t realize is that this was a made-for-TV movie. Made for NBC in 1992. TV is different now. TV gets big budgets, big movie stars, and big prestige. In 1992 movies made for broadcast television were usually pretty lame.

Oh well, live and learn, and all that.

Arquette plays Joanna Warren a children’s book author. There is a serial killer on the loose who is dragging women into the woods, I mean The Deep Woods, and doing terrible things to them. Joanna might be his next victim (well, probably not his next victim because that would build our climax a little too quickly, but it is a safe bet he’ll go after her in the last act.

Perkins is the creepy old dude who might be a private investigator who might have some sort of relationship with one of the victims. He might have been hired by her parents. He lies a lot. The film plays up his potential to be the actual killer.

Patton plays the police detective assigned to the case. He keeps creeping on Joanna, asking her out on dates even though she repeatedly turns him down. The film periodically plays up his potential to be the actual killer.

Amy Ryan is Joanna’s sister, I think, or maybe just a friend. Her husband gets a little play as the potential killer, but mostly she’s just a gal pal Joanna can talk to amongst all the creepy dudes.

My favorite part of the film is that the killer is supposedly some kind of mastermind. He’s brutally killing these girls but leaving no clues, no fingerprints or DNA and there are definitely no witnesses. And yet the film continually shows us his crimes (well shows us as much as a TV movie from the early 1990s was allowed to show us) and it is often in daylight, and in public. One time we see him grab a girl in a busy parking lot. Two seconds before he grabs the lady we see extra walking around. Yet no witnesses.

This is a dumb movie. There are a few noir/Giallo touches that are nice, and Perkins is enjoyable – I mean his character is ridiculous, constantly obfuscating his motives for no reason – but he’s enjoyable to watch.

But watching it got me to thinking about made-for-TV movies from this era. This was before prestige TV. This was when television was considered a lesser medium than cinema. This was before streaming. Thirty-minute sitcoms and hour-long dramas ruled television. Now again they’d make a mini-series or a feature-length movie to show on a Monday night. Sometimes they’d get real celebrities to star in them. Their budgets were usually small and they tended to cater to the biggest possible audience. A serial killer movie fits that bill.

Thinking about In the Deep Woods in that context. Had I watched it at a time when there weren’t a thousand awesome shows in my queue and when I often watched whatever happened to be on. I might not have hated it. It would still be a long way from good, but I bet I’d enjoyed myself.