Ranger Mark Cody patrols the forests of Hazelville, the camping town of USA. With the upcoming Memorial Day Weekend, the biggest camping weekend of the year, Cody will have his hands full with the tourists coming into town. But Cody also has another problem, over the last few days campers are being killed by a rogue great white pine that is lurking in the woods. The pine, described by Cody's friend Max Cooper, an environmentalist, is nothing short of a living killing and eating machine. Can Cody and Cooper along with the gruff lumberjack Squint, stop the menacing pine or will all of Hazelville fall victim to the terror of the trees!

A shot-for-shot parody of Jaws, Trees is a hilarious send up of a horror and motion picture icon.

Kevin McCauley stars as Cody. McCauley at times captures the grimaces of Roy Schneider with uncanny perfection and at times he appears to be a generic version of the fearsome shark hunter. Phillip Gardiner plays Cooper and Peter Randazzo plays the Quint-knock-off Squint. Although they do good jobs, these two look nothing like their Jaws counter parts.

Trees takes Jaws and simply substitutes a tree for the shark and woods for the beach, and for fans of camp or absurd humor, this film works extremely well. They also change some of the dialog to fit in to the new surroundings. One of the best being when the mayor of Hazelville spouts "Now Cody hold on, you go into the forest and say bear, everyone looks around and says huh? what?. But you go and yell tree! and you have mass panic on your hands.". This is a great play on the barracuda/shark comparison in Jaws. Also, in Jaws, when Quint and the boys are trying to bait in the shark with chum and Brody complains about Cooper not having to "shovel some of this shit.". In Trees to bait the tree in the rip-off scene, they actually use "shit" as the chum, which had me rolling when Cody gave the same line.

The effects are pretty much a few branches tied to a camera and blood sprayed into the air, but that doesn't matter, it is Trees loyalty to Jaws that makes it so fun to watch regardless of how stupid it is. From the guys catching the possible great pine, to the half ass tree autopsy, Trees was an absolute blast. I have to thank Nflames for sending me a copy of this, and I hate to tell him that he ain't getting it back, this is the kind of flick that I love. A good parody, but a truly great homage.

8/10

Once upon a time, a bunch of guys decided that they loved Jaws so much, they wanted to film an homage to it. But what were they to do, when they were not by the ocean but the woods, and had campgrounds instead of beaches? Land shark?

The answer is "Trees", and a lovely homage it is, too. A man-eating Great White Pine has staked a claim to the woods around Hazelville, but can ranger Cody, big-city botanist and tree-hugger Cooper, and crusty lumberjack Squint unite to destroy the creature before Hazelville's camping tourism business is destroyed for good?

For something clearly filmed on a shoestring and using digital cameras, the film actually looks surpsingly good and is very well put together. Featuring brilliantly cheesy effects (the tree attacks involve people waving tree branches or literally throwing buckets of blood from off camera) and reasonably good spoofs of the actors in Jaws, this movie is in some parts a shot-for-shot remake of its source material. Everyone does an admirable job pulling this off - the actors are completly deadpan, the production is well thought out and executed, some of the direction is very impressive (notwithstanding being directly cribbed from Spielberg) and, alarmingly, parts of the script lifted directly from Jaws make perfect, but different, sense in the new context. Horror-spoofs tend not to be very funny, but this one nails it, not least because everyone involved clearly loves and reveres the original.

Even if you already know Jaws (or like some of us are old enough to remember its original release), I recommend dedicating a movie night to watching Jaws and Trees back to back to maximize your appreciation for the cleverness of what these backwoods film makers pulled off. Most of the fun of this movie is the Jaws references (and flat out rip-offs), and it doesn't really stand on its own. That said, my 4 year old, who has never seen Jaws, LOVES this movie (and its sequel, Trees 2: the Root of All Evil, which is not as clever but which features a Christmas theme, a significant increase in budget, CGI tree-monsters and Ron Palillo, better known as Horseshack on Welcome Back Kotter, who is clearly having a ball slumming). But then he's 4, and making sense isn't really one of his priorities.

Trees gets an 8.5 out of 10.