I was given the opportunity to watch and review Wild Boys an independent film for 2023 which gathers inspiration from The Goonies, Ace Ventura and George of the Jungle. The film is available now for rental or purchase on Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube Movies and Tubi. You can check out the trailer on our YouTube channel below:
The film follows a young woman named Kate (Kate Frampton Davis), who is working on a video game and never leaves the house. Her father gets her milkshakes daily and one day he does not come home. In his last will, her dad leaves her a challenge/demands that she go on an adventure or else she will lose her inheritance and home. On this mission, she meets up and befriends two feral young men living in the woods names Red (Vincent Catalina) and Jondeer (Jordan Laemmlen). The trio, occasionally assisted by Kate’s late fathers friend Dan (Patrick Andersen) must uncover clues to lead to the treasure. You can tell that there is a strong influence by The Goonies in the group uncovering clues to get to the next “level” of the treasure hunt. Other than Kate telling others that she never leaves the house, we never really delve into the backstory of our lead character and why she refuses to leave her home.
Visually, the film is done really well. It does not look like your typically lower budget film. The visuals were very crisp and made you really appreciate the landscape that they were traversing through the film. Soundwise, the film also was spot on, you wont miss any dialogue or sounds in the film as everything was handled terrifically.
The film does not have a robust cast,which is a good thing. As mentioned earlier the main characters are Kate, Red and Jondeer. They are being hunted by Axel (Vince Major), an ICE agent who assumes the Wild Boys are terrorists from Canada and teams up with some locals, Bear (Kaylie Gibson) and Yap (Bill Hoversten). Alyssa Padia stars as Sheriff Maggie Jones who is routing for Kate but also has to uphold the law. Character development is one area I would like to have seen more, as mentioned we do not have backstory on Kate and we never get the payoff for the Wild Boys of where there came from and how they got to live in the wilderness.
The film was good for most age groups and the story was easy to follow as we were just following the onscreen action and not really having to think much. I feel the moral of the film was to put down your devices and get outside from time to time which is a good message to promote. It is the type of movie that you can watch with your kids or if you just want a fresh take on an adventure quest out in the woods. On a scale of 5 Splats, Wild Boys 2023 gets:
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