Not to long after borrowing Trick Or Treat from my friend Steven Cisna while I was still employed at DSC down in Champaign, I also borrowed a movie on DVD from him titled The Forest. The cover art is so damn cool that it has always made me wish that this flick was more energetic and exciting than it really is because it's as slow as daddy's spitfire cooking up some human meat for dinner. I barely remembered anything from watching this from way back then when this horror film hobby was still smelling and feeling fresh to me as a noob, so visiting it again for a second time this morning was actually kind of a treat because it was like I was watching The Forest for the first time-again. Which that's actually what it was. A complete revisit on a backwoods slasher that I had only previously seen one time that I recalled nothing about. That part of this was actually exciting in a way because it was like jogging my memory and cleaning out the cobwebs in the back of my brain about what this flick entails because it's an early entry that syphoned me even further into wanting to collect physical copies of these things along with just wondering in general about what else is out there. If you're new to horror in general or are a filthy casual (I know, that phrase for gatekeeping is usually reserved for the video game crowd) then this original version of The Forest is probably going to make you get up and leave within the first few minutes because this thing is slow. It does plod along. There are monstrous gaps where seemingly not a lot happens even though the story is progressing, it just has a pace where it feels like you're extremities are starting to get numb and there isn't a whole lot you can do about it. I've never seen the 2016 remake of this so I can't say whether that one is justified or maybe even better than this one, but with the mediocre to shit track record that remakes usually have I'm just going to sit here and judge it without ever seeing it and say that it probably sucks. And it probably doesn't even have any atmosphere or tension to it like this one does, even though the original here does teeter on the edge of being close-my-eyes-during-the-exposition boring to having all four of our main protagonists being chased by the local psychotic hermit that hunts and kills other people for food. Yeah, so the center of The Forest is a plot where the events that lead to where these people are in the context of this film is the exact same as a couple of others that I've watched in the last couple of years or so-namely Truth Or Dare?: A Critical Madness and Las Vegas Bloodbath because the reason behind the brutality in those pieces are the same as this one-our main guy comes home from work to find his wife whoring it up with a random dickhead in their bed, and they lose it. All three of these guys turn to abuse, violence, burning property down, hunting other human beings for food and just generally causing chaos because their world has no stance and purpose anymore. I totally get it. But if it were me, the only person that would need to pay would either be the wife and/or the guy that takes up the other half of the affair. There's no reason to drag randoms into a situation that they have nothing to do with, but I can also see the angle for complete nihilism and hatred consuming your heart too. The man that loses it here in The Forest does in fact kill his wife and the asshat that she's in bed with-and then he just leaves with his two kids to live in a little cave with a wicker chair and an open pit spittle in the nearby forest. He eventually turns into a cannibal and his children become very ill so they... um... unalive themselves. Yeah. We fortunately don't see any of that happen because just imagining that situation alone is horrifying in and of itself and I can't really grasp the intensity and darkness of the emotions that this guy has to be harboring for what has happened to his family. It's pretty fucked up. The Forest is an early 80's backwoods horror flick where you don't see much but a lot is given to you as an audience member through the dialogue and edited cutaways on purpose to give your imagination a run for it's money. Would I wholly recommend this flick to you zits and zombies? Yes and no-yes because it's something slightly different and that poster art just sucks you in and no because of how damn slow it feels most of the time and I just wish that there was a little more blood or something to keep the interest going versus what's actually in the film-which is almost nil. There's maybe a couple of quick scenes where you actually see some kind of blood or a knife sticking out of someone's chest or something, but that's really about it. Other than that it's the ghosts of the kids and their mother inhabiting the forest while the dad/husband hunts people that just so happen to go hiking or fishing or whatever nearby the cave that he's decided to live in. The ghost kids are always trying to warn the people there to watch out for their father and the ghost mom is always looking for them and telling patrons that if they see them, they need to tell them to go home because that's where they belong. I've been hiking and camping before and it's a good time-but there never were any apparitions of children or a dead wife trying to talk to me. The probably would have put me off forever. I do love me a nature walk and a solid forest to trail in-but not this one. Not the one from 1982. Hell, I wasn't even born yet when this was released. Now I'm hungry for some ribs-dammit.
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