The film opens with a man and woman being stalked through
the woods and killed by an unseen assailant. Steve (Dean Russell) and Sharon (Tomi
Barrett) are a married couple who are not getting along. Steve and his friend,
Charlie (John Batis), decide they are going to go camping without their wives,
since they are females and obviously couldn’t handle roughing it. This of course doesn’t sit well with Sharon
and Teddi (Ann Wilkinson), so they decide to go without the guys, who they tell
to meet them at the campsite later that evening. The men leave almost
immediately after the women, and they all end up getting lost in the woods and stalked
by a cannibal, or a ghost, or a cannibal ghost (is that a thing?)
The Forest is an
exceptionally unique approach to the slasher genre. It retains the most basic
elements of the genre: a mysterious
knife wielding figure killing off characters one by one in the woods, but
forgoes the teens, the sexuality, and the hardline moralistic universe most
slashers inhabit (i.e. If you have sex/get drunk/do drugs, you die .) The
Forest scores points by having its most unsettling scene take place while
people are having a conversation and enjoying some…meat. This is by no means a
perfect movie, it’s amateurishly shot, and the bizarre upbeat synthesizer
score is very out of place. Thanks to some production problems it is edited
haphazardly, many scenes don't make a lot of sense together, it could enhance the weirdness but mostly it's just confusing. I found it easy to overlook these flaws, simply because of
interesting variations on the slasher film that The Forest brings to the table.
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