If you and your friends are spending time in a secluded house in the woods, you might want to watch out for the crazed, backwoods serial killer with the disheveled looking baby-doll mask that tends to prowl around those areas. Someone should have given the characters in Don’t Look this warning because they really could have used it.

Written by Jessica Boucher and Danielle Killay and directed by/starring Luciana Faulhaber, Don’t Look follows a group of friends who spend Thanksgiving at Nicole’s (Lindsay DiFulvo) remote house in the woods. But soon, they discover that their Thanksgiving festivities are interrupted by a murderous hillbilly who wants to carve the kids like turkeys.

To the film’s credit, it’s commendable that the production team is primarily composed of women. While final girls have been a staple of the slasher subgenre since its inception, it is rather admirable to see a team of women committed to bringing one of these blood-soaked stories to life. They get to have fun with the gore as it pours down the screen, and the joy they have for the subgenre is admirable.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop Don’t Look from playing out like a standard, backwoods slasher film. The only thing that sets this one apart from those, however, is that this one runs into every low hanging branch on the “stupid tree” while fleeing from its generic hillbilly killer.

There are many glaring flaws with this movie, but chief among them is the story. What story, you ask? Exactly. While slasher films have always been somewhat light on plot, this film is a special kind of vacant, where things just sort of happen without purpose between the generic kills. The closest that this film gets to having a through-line involves a character’s past trauma, which is used to set up an act III twist that’s legitimately pointless.

To add insult to injury, the cast at play here can never find a way to make their characters feel like people. Most of their actions are nonsensical and random, and the dialogue they’re given is abysmally bad. They’re always either drinking, being classist toward the locals, having sex, or being terrorized. The only cast members who seem to be having any fun are Jarrod Robbins and Hailey Heisick as Kelley and Sheri Baby respectively, two overly social backwoods hick stereotypes with some laughably strange bedroom kinks. They just so happen to be the closest that any character in this film comes to being entertaining.

It would help if Don’t Look was competently assembled, but even that seems to be too much to ask of this film. While the film is low budget and that should be taken into account, that doesn’t excuse a film from being technically competent. The editing is choppy and awkward, none of the sound design is layered or organic, and the footage goes out of focus so much you’d think the cinematographer saw the title of this movie and thought, “challenge accepted.” I’m certain this must have been the case, because if he had looked, he might have actually noticed the crew member visibly sitting on the ground in the background of one of the shots.

One thing is certain, Don’t Look is a very apt title for this film. It’s messy and awkward and tries to get by on some adequate, albeit generic, gore effects. But it doesn’t have the characters, story, or technical prowess to make these gore scenes even slightly effective. So, don’t look at Don’t Look.