Thursday, October 11, 2012

October 2012 Edition #11: THE FOREST







Director: Donald M. Jones

Screenplay: Donald M. Jones
Starring: Dean Russell, Gary Kent, Tomi Barrett, John Batis, Ann Wilkinson
Release Date: 1982


THE FOREST is the worst movie I have ever watched on purpose. I have technically seen worse movies, I suppose, but all of those came with the benefit of being featured on episodes of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. I’m not as funny or quick-witted as Joel/Mike and the ‘bots, and even if I were that’s a moot point, because I had to view this turgid pile of dog shit by myself. I’m glad I was alone because anyone who watched it with me would have probably de-friended me after delivering a swift kick to my testicles. And I would have deserved it, as much as Donald M. Jones, the “auteur” behind this rancid shit-pile, deserves to be tied to a chair with razor-blades taped to his eyelids while being forced to watch the cinematic excrement he unleashed onto an unsuspecting world.




No. Fuck this! I’m going to attempt to be positive in my review of this…..movie. Yeah, I think the only way to get on with my life is to remain optimistic and try to turn lemons into lemonade if you will. After all, every movie ever made, no matter how awful, is SOMEONE’S favorite movie, so maybe if I try to find the things that someone else might enjoy I can come away from this with minimal mental scarring. Okay! (takes a deep breath)  Let’s do this!

This movie features some very impressive footage of early-80’s Los Angeles traffic.

That’s it. I’m done. There is nothing left to say beyond that.


Get used to this view, guys. You're going to be seeing a lot of this.

FUCK! Fuck you movie! Fuck you with your stiff, entirely unbelievable males leads, whose entire relationship reeks with the sweaty stench of homoeroticism. I don’t believe Steve and Charlie are friends. I don’t believe they have wives. I don’t believe they have EVER been camping. But most of all, I don’t believe they are actually human beings. I’ll tell you what I do believe, though. There was a lot of traffic in Los Angeles during the thirteen days it took to make this thing. Tons of it. So much so that after an initial 10 minute montage of a sea of cars, y’know, driving and stuff, the next 45 minutes of the movie is littered with more scenes of nail-biting driving, overdubbed with the actors laying on exposition about what “manly men” they are, and how they, like, totally drink beers and cook steaks and shit, cuz they’re men! Yeah! I’m not buying it!


I forgot to even mention these two, who are killed off in the first five minutes, but who gives a fuck?

They’re wives Sharon (Barrett) and Teddi (Wilkinson) are also involved, and I wanted to punch the actresses portraying them as swiftly and violently as I did the male actors. The girls want to prove how totally progressive and feminist they are by setting off for a camping trip into the titular forest a scant couple of hours ahead of their husbands. The entirety of these gals’ dialogue consists of them blathering on and on about how chauvinistic their husbands are and how they’re going to make a statement, because this movie is deep and shit.

Never before has domestic violence seemed so appealing.

So the girls set out deep into the wilderness and after completely and utterly failing at setting up a tent decide to make camp for the night. As they do so the ghosts of two mouth-breathing children, a brother and sister, appear and start breathily babbling about how they’ve found some new friends. From this point forward the flick flies totally off the rails, seemingly flipping the bird to anything resembling a cohesive narrative, logic, or anything resembling reality to anyone but the most intellectually destitute pig farmers.


I have nothing bad to say about this.

After being randomly accosted by the ghostly specter of the children’s mother Sharon and Teddi are attacked and Teddi is stabbed to death by the film’s chief villain, the father of the two annoying dead kids, the bloody psychopath whom the mere mention of his name strikes fear into even the most jaded men: John. Yes, the killer is some confused old white guy with about a weeks beard growth wearing a trucker hat and a wife-beater. And his name is John. I don’t know about you, but I just shit my pants.


John, the latest name in grueling terror.

Meanwhile, the two doofuses, I mean husbands, finally make it to the campgrounds and immediately become lost. They quickly meet up with John who instead of killing them takes them back to his cave and tells them his whole backstory, about how he walked in on his wife boning some dude while the kids were locked in a closet and so he killed them and ran off with the children to live in the woods, but the kids committed suicide and now he scavenges for food while talking to the ghosts of his children. Y’know, that old wives tale. Oh, and he also serves an oblivious Charli a juicy piece of his wife, which he declares damn tasty. I guess I should have been disturbed by this, but that would have required me to actually give a damn, something I was not willing to even pretend to do at this point.

So John the serial-cannibal lets the men just leave, and then I kinda passed out from boredom for a few minutes and couldn’t be bothered to rewind, but when I came to they were separated and Steve had injured his ankle and spent a good five minutes crying like the little pussy he is. While this is going on Sharon is having long, infuriating conversations with the two spazzy ghost kids about how much better things are now that they’re dead, and it was around this point that I began to agree with them.

You know what? I’m done synopsizing this movie. For the next thirty or so minutes “things” alleged “happen”, all of them mind-numbingly stupid and asinine, and then the credits rolled before I got around to shooting myself in the face.


Duuuhhh, you mean this movie has a script?!

Fuck this movie. Fuck everyone involved in the making of this movie. Fuck the insane people (and they exist) who actually like this thing. The performances are all sub-Ed Wood, the endlessly looping synth score is nightmarishly awful, the writing is laughable, and every shot of the movie looked like an excerpt from the Bigfoot episode of IN SEARCH OF…., but with all of the atmosphere of an episode of MAGNUM P.I. In fact, I’ve seen episodes of that show that scared the piss out of me way more than THE FOREST. According to a featurette on the DVD, director Donald M. Jones mortgaged his house in order to finance this syphilitic cinematic abortion, and ended up losing everything.

Good. It takes a special kind of movie to make me this mad, but Mr. Jones, you fucking did it. Congratulations! You made the worst movie I have ever reviewed for this blog! I might have to start up a whole separate section for movie’s like THE FOREST, because not only is it shit, but it is shit I wish I could unsee.

My Rating: 1 colostomy bag / 10

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