"DADDY'S GONE A HUNTING!"

Now that's a tagline! And yes he certainly has gone hunting! Just like my brain hunted for any morsel of logic in this strange film. On the outside the Forest seems like your typical backwoods slasher. Well it just turns out that there's a magical beast of nonsensical madness lurking in this unassuming little film!

The plot is a real doozy. John catches his wife having an affair and kills both her and her lover. He grabs his kids and flees into the forest. His children end up getting sick and kill themselves and now they are ghost children! What? And now John has turned into a murderous cannibal hermit! Ghost wife shows up too! The…

A man decides the best way of dealing with his wife having a bunch of affairs is to kill her, move his kids into a cave in the woods and eat people. Unsuspecting backpackers troop off to their demise, despite being forewarned by that classic harbinger of doom, the world weary park ranger.

No-one meets their demise quickly either. This movie takes its sweeeeet time, with everything. For a film about a forest it takes a fucking age to get there, squeezing in such thrill-packed scenes as the boys' Mazda pickup running low on water along the way. The editing ensures night and day are relative concepts.

My favourite scene featured a man defending himself from the girlfriend-muncher with a…

Gary Kent’s gotta eat and he cannot seem to ditch his ghost kids; when anyone happens to hike through his neck of the woods (in California, outside LA), it is almost inevitable they meet the grisly end of his hunting knife. Kent’s got as much personality as a wood stump, sort of droopy (imagine if Sigh was built into a man) in countenance, as if he just cannot muster up the energy to put any effort into a performance. I will always have a weakness for early 80s slasher wilderness and natural landscape settings even if perplexingly few filmmakers could crack the code on how to make films work from start to finish (I’m a huge “Just Before Dawn” fan,…

Gonna take its sweet time to warm up, but hear me out it’s so worth the sluggish ride. After an early pair of brutal murders by an unseen killer, the film slows into a lazy island of mystery. Who’s stalking who? What are these ghost kids and why can’t someone just grab a flashlight? For long stretches, it’s just four adults trudging through the woods with a bunch of shit on their backs. Gotta let em cook.

The middle is rough. I wasn’t exactly itching with anticipation as Sharon, Teddi, Steve, and Charlie wander around aimlessly between thunderstorm setups and awkward campfire chatter. Still, there’s something oddly comforting in the low production, fading daylight shots, and that uneasy quiet before…

That weird 70s/ early 80s ‘humor’ about how women's lib brainwashed women who are actually still stupid (Midge on that 70s show being a good example) into thinking they can also do stuff like go on camping trips because they read about it only it’s still too hard! (Implying that women can't do stuff or even learn to do stuff) I guess they need men after all ... Plus those narrative songs in a horror movie are either hilarious or make you wish you never had ears.

Procrastinating another fun phone conversation with my nurse practitioner’s receptionist about my annual exam. Yesterday, she was like ‘oh they clean stuff really well!’ when I asked about their procedures like that's literally…

I recently watched The Forest (1982) on a random streaming service. The storyline follows a cannibalistic man living in isolation, haunting the forest and preying on unsuspecting campers and hikers.

This film is written and directed by Don Jones (The Love Butcher) and stars Gary Kent (Dracula vs. Frankenstein), Tomi Barrett (The Pyramid), John Batis (Teenage Gang Debs), and Jeanette O’Connor (Arizona Heat).

This is one of those movies that had real potential but completely falls flat. The setting is ideal for the premise—a creepy, remote forest perfect for an ’80s horror backdrop. The backstory involving the father and his kids is actually a unique setup and could have been a strong foundation for a chilling tale.

Unfortunately, the horror…