By Geno McGahee
In 1980, Friday the 13th came out. In 1981, The Burning entertained slasher fans and then in 1982, we have “The Forest.” We begin with an unfortunate set of hikers that journey too far into the woods and come across a psycho with a knife, and both end up dead. Now, we know that there is a killer in the woods, proving that there is room for this guy, Jason, the burnt guy from The Burning, Madman Marz, the mutant from The Prey, and even some Evil Dead. The woods are vast…plenty of room for psychos.
Steve (Dean Russell) and Charlie (John Batis) are irritated at the big city traffic and need to get away. They elect to go camping and Steve knows just the place. It’s remote, where they can be away from everything. They are going to meet a couple of hot girls up there for some nature love. Sharon (Tomi Barrett) and Teddi (Ann Wilkinson) get to the woods first and see these children and their mother…the family of the psycho/cannibal in the woods.
Steve and Charlie eventually make it to the woods and stumble across a strange man, in a cave, cooking a human heart on a rotisserie, and really in the need of some conversation. He begins to tell the duo about his life before becoming a psycho cannibal that lives in a cave. He had a family, but it all fell apart when he walked in on his cheating wife. He had no choice but to kill her, and then kill the repair man that she was screwing behind his back in one of the most absurd death scenes that I have ever seen. The director was probably having a bad day.
Now this movie is original in one sense, having ghosts warn the potential victims, but it is slow moving and definitely is one of the weaker slasher films that I have seen out of this time. The ghost kids are annoying, especially with the echoing voices, the acting is very bad, and the killer (Gary Kent) does not deliver his lines with any emotions. None of these characters are memorable or defined. There was no character development at all. This was just a script thrown together to capitalize on the trend of slasher films it seems and really fails on nearly every count. Sure the soundtrack rocks, but the rest is horrible.
Scared Stiff Rating: 3/10 a below average slasher trying to capitalize on a time when these movies were huge.
