of her plan because she has the strongest powers among the gifted students. Heather is coerced into completing the ritual, and the vines begin to mummify all of the girls in the school. Before it can complete itself, Joe breaks into the room with an ax and begins to kill the witches. Heather breaks free from the vines and grabs the ax, proceeding to chop all of the witches into pieces. Heather and Joe then leave with all of the girls, walking down the road into the daylight as the school burns in the distance behind them. The end of the movie states that Falburn Academy burned to the ground in 1965, while the surrounding woods were strangely left untouched. Cast Production The Woods was shot in 2004 at Mels Cité du Cinema in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Release The Woods had its North American premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal in 2006. The film's distributor, United Artists, planned for a theatrical release, but it was shelved after Sony Pictures bought out United Artists' parent company, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in 2004. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released the film direct-to-DVD in the United States on October 3, 2006 following festival screenings. Critical response Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 69% of 16 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 6.30/10. Brian Holcomb of the independent film review website Beyond Hollywood wrote: "The Woods plays like a classic Lewton film of the 1940s, where the emphasis was on telling a good yarn without much ado and wrapping it up in a tightly wound 70 minutes." Film journalist Nick Schager noted that the film "proves to be one of the most polished and inventive horror flicks of the still-ongoing year, a synthesis of classical supernatural and sexualized imagery that expands upon, rather than simply regurgitates, its celebrated predecessors," and compared it to Suspiria (1977) and Carrie (1976). DVD Talks Scott Weinberg praised the film's performances as "uniformly excellent" and also praised the cinematography and musical score. References External links 2006 films 2000s supernatural horror films American supernatural horror films Films set in boarding schools 2000s English-language films Films about witchcraft Films directed by Lucky McKee Films scored by John Frizzell (composer) Films set in 1965 Films shot in Montreal 2000s American films