n this sequel to the less-than-famous rampaging-killer-tree movie Trees, the Great White Pines attack a ski resort village en masse, culminating in a massive street battle on Christmas Eve.
As in the original, parallels to Jaws are not only deliberate but overbearing. The hero is Ranger Cody (McCauley), a contrast to the Spielberg film's Chief Brody who not only tries to act like Roy Scheider but also looks a little like him. He is joined by a botanist and expert in killer trees, Max Cooper (Gardiner), who is not quite as successful riffing on Scheider's co-star Richard Dreyfuss.
Cody is traumatized by the climax of the first movie, in which the Great Pine tore apart the pickup truck piloted by the salty lumberjack Squint (Peter Randazzo). He wets the bed and—in a flaw that dooms the careers of most forest rangers—panics at the mere sight of a tree. He is just beginning to pull himself together, thanks to "one of those tree-phobia support groups," when a series of local deaths alerts him to the looming threat of a new attack by leafy mutants.
Cooper is also suspicious, demanding of one skeptical authority, "Have you ever tried to outrun a 70-foot-tall screaming mahogany monolith with branches the wingspan of a 747?" Later, he notes, "After you've been working with trees as long as I have, you can tell when they've done something wrong."
Eventually, rampaging CGI trees and a mob of townspeople wielding axes and chainsaws clash head-on at the town center, in a scene invoking the collision of armies in Braveheart.
Nobody notices the two poor schlubs freezing to death on the ski lift, after Cody accidentally unhooks the power early in the film. As days of story-time pass, we keep returning to them every 20 minutes or so, for an update on the icicles forming from their nostrils. But, hey. At least there's no goat.
Horshack returns ... needlessly
The first Trees movie evidently did well enough to attract the presence of an actual, sort-of, shut-your-eyes and pretend-it-counts celebrity for the sequel: in this case, Ron Palillo, best (and, for the most part, only) known for playing Arnold Horshack on the '70s TV series Welcome Back, Kotter. His minor supporting role here, as Dougie Styles, an annoying real estate developer with a fully reciprocated crush on Cody's less-than-supportive wife, Helen (Mary Ann Nilan), defines gratuitous, which doesn't stop the producers of this thing from headlining him in both the credits and the accompanying publicity.
This permits us to coin a new rule of moviemaking: If you consider obtaining Horshack a casting coup, chances are you've already lost.
The film deserves a little credit, though. Like many of its ilk, it aspires to be "so bad it's good." And while it doesn't quite manage to achieve those rarefied heights, in large part because the intervals between genuinely funny moments are so extended that they prevent the entire enterprise from building up any genuine energy of its very own, those moments range from stupid but amusing to a very few that are downright clever. The aforementioned Braveheart riff is a highlight. So is the deputy forest ranger who's so stupid he's astonished when told that Stevie Wonder is blind. And the bouncy closing theme, which includes the lyrics, "Killer trees! More deadly than the angriest bees! Killer trees! They even aggravate my allergies!"
But Trish Dunn, a past contestant on Survivor, is worse than awful as Dougie's daughter Darla. It may be the least convincing performance as a blind person in movie history. And it's even worse when she's supposed to be desperately fighting one of the monsters. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
