he film's opening title card warns this is a parody-cum-remake of Steven Spielberg's Jaws. A flirty girl named Nancy (Reynolds) leads a drunken boy into the woods for a hike. The boy is too inebriated to follow, and passes out. In the woods, poor Nancy is stalked by an unseen entity that overtakes and kills her. Park Ranger Cody (McCauley) and his faithful second-in-command, Dusty (Lakin), are called on the case. They search the woods and find Nancy's half-devoured remains.
Mayor Swindell (Michaud) of Hazelville tells Cody to keep a lid on the death, as the town's economy depends upon the revenues generated by the coming Memorial Day rush of tourists and hikers. Cody reluctantly complies. The next day, a young boy playing ball in the woods dies the same way as did Nancy. It's determined a killer tree is responsible. A $200 bounty is placed on the tree, but local veteran lumberjack Squint (Randazzo) tells the town council that this killer tree is out of their league, and demands a thousand bucks.
Enter "tree-hugger-of-the-year" botanist Max Cooper (Gardiner), who informs all that the culprit is a "great white pine," and the tree that local woodsmen have captured is not the killer conifer they are after. Memorial Day comes, and the great white pine attacks several hikers in the woods. Ranger Cody, Cooper and Squint go off to the deep woods to put an end to the killer pine's reign of terror once and for all.
A tired and lumbering satire
Jaws is probably one of the most heavily mined and quoted films of all time. Consider the low-budget wonders made right after the initial release of Jaws, like Grizzly, the big-budget cash-ins, like Orca, and the recent movies that liberally pinch from it, like Lake Placid. All these films, even the most blatant rip-offs, show more respect for Spielberg's 1975 thriller than does this deeply unfunny and annoying film, which claims to be a loving homage.
The fictive amateurishness of Waiting for Guffman and the genuine amateurishness of Coven (the mini-epic the creation of which was chronicled in the documentary American Movie) are much more endearing than the unintentional amateurishness of Trees. Trees is simply not as clever or funny as its creators think it to be.
Brevity is the soul of the Jaws parody, from the opening shots of Zucker, Zucker and Abrahams' Airplane! to the original Saturday Night Live's "land shark" sketches; there's only so much that can be made witty out of the source material. At 87 minutes, Trees feels interminable. Since Trees slavishly follows Jaws almost scene for scene, the audience can anticipate the lousy jokes before they are inflicted, thereby compounding the tedium with dread. One scene does pinch Karen Allen's drinking match from Raiders, replacing the shot glasses of liquor with pancakes; at least no scenes were taken from Spielberg films such as Amistad or Saving Private Ryan.
Some of the cast deserve credit for soldiering through the material ... but that's not reason enough for any audience to soldier through Trees.
