The 
  Forest 

Slasher Trash with Panache?

Review:  JA Kerswell

A quickie FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) cash-in from the director of proto-slasher THE LOVE BUTCHER (1975) and the infamous exploitation classic SCHOOLGIRLS IN CHAINS (1973), THE FOREST is a rather clunky affair​—albeit not without some period charm for non-discriminating fans of early 80s slasher cinema. Two couples escape the heat and smog of LA for a camping trip in the wilderness, where they encounter a homicidal hermit with a taste for human flesh and his ghostly kin.
 
The backwoods sure were a dangerous place for hikers in the early 1980s. Despite this, Sharon (Tomi Barret) and Teddi (Ann Wilkinson) tease their respective boyfriends Steve (Dean Russell) and Charlie (John Batis) that they can enjoy a trip in the wilderness without them, as they good-humoredly rail against their male chauvinist jokes. The pair leave, but Steve and Charlie follow shortly afterwards, only to get delayed when their truck breaks down. The women set off for Steve’s cabin deep in the forest, but they soon become lost. And, if we had any suspicion that Don Jones was aiming to make a feminist horror movie, those thoughts are quickly dashed when the women are shown to not only be unable to navigate the woods but are visibly exhausted 30 seconds after leaving their car. They can’t put up a tent either, without their boyfriends. However, the pair make the best of it and set up a campfire, but are spooked by the appearance of a woman in a chiffon nightdress with a bloody wound on her head, asking if they know where her children are. The woman vanishes before their eyes, which elicits a rather calm “Who the hell was that?” from Sharon. 
 
Later, after falling asleep, she is awoken by two strange children who warn her that “Daddy is coming” and she flees; leaving Teddi to be attacked by a man in a baseball cap with a large knife (Gary Kent as possibly the least threatening looking of all the killers from early ‘80s slasher cinema), who tells her he doesn’t wish her harm he just wants to eat her because he’s feeling a bit peckish! 

Meanwhile, as Steve and Charlie eventually arrive at the national park, they get the requisite backwoods slasher movie warning by a local ranger (played by director Don Jones) that people go missing in these woods, but have a nice time anyway. They trudge slowly through the terrain (and there is a lot of trudging and meandering in THE FOREST), and they come across a cave that the killer has brightened up with a wicker rocking chair and fancy gothic candelabra. He is surprisingly hospitable considering his earlier murderous excursion. He invites them in, which results in the film’s sole truly transgressive moment when Charlie unknowingly eats a piece of his dead girlfriend, who is roasting over a fire. This scene leads to a lengthy Q&A info dump session between the hikers and the backwoods cannibal. A flashback shows that the reason he lives in the woods is that he caught his wife cheating. He killed her and her repairman lover before hotfooting it to the wilderness with his two children, Jennifer (Becki Burke) and John Jr (the quirkily named Corky Pigeon)​—plus, presumably, that gothic candelabra. The film has a plot malfunction when we find out that the children, who hated their dead mother, killed themselves for no apparent reason after reaching the forest and now have returned as ghosts.
 
The two men leave the cave and continue looking for their girlfriends, but Daddy’s got the munchies again and is soon back on the human hunting trail …
 
THE FOREST is a somewhat awkward attempt to meld the emerging backwoods slasher with an explicitly supernatural twist, but neither approach really clicks. One of the issues that can occur with slasher movies set in the wilderness is the endless time showing future victims huffing and puffing up hiking trails​—and THE FOREST has this in spades. Possibly the film’s biggest issue is Gary Kent, who is thoroughly miscast as the killer. He is fine with the fight/stunt scenes, but he  lacks any real menace and mostly looks as if he’d be happier drinking a Bud Light in that rocking chair than chasing and butchering campers. It perhaps doesn’t help that the script calls for his character to be both maudlin and psychotic. He mostly looks befuddled. In a misjudged effort to suggest the spectral, his ghostly children’s dialogue is so reverb-heavy that it largely becomes unintelligible. The film may be reaching for pathos, but it misses by a long shot. Worse for a thriller, it fails to build up any semblance of momentum or urgency. Even the climactic moments are visually lifted from Sean S. Cunningham’s FRIDAY THE 13TH, but with not an ounce of that film’s shock value. However, it does open with a scene of two other hikers being killed, which was added after the original cut was deemed too short. This prologue would get an award for the character who turns around the most and looks into the woods in a slasher film, if ever such an award were to exist. The actress, Marilyn Anderson, only had one other appearance in a 1983 episode of DYNASTY as a secretary, where she graduates from looking at trees to briefly looking at Joan Collins. 

THE FOREST gives that other backwoods slasher DON’T GO IN THE WOODS … ALONE! (1981) a run for its money for worst soundtrack. It’s incidental music sounds like a restless drunk fell asleep on a synthesiser. However, like that film’s jaw-dropping end song parodying the Teddy Bears’ Picnic, this movie features what sounds like an Elvis impersonator warbling lines such as “Many have died in the dark side of The Forest” as, you guessed, it shows people trudging slowly along a hiking trail.
 
THE FOREST was shot over twelve days in Sequoia National Park in October 1980 on a shooting budget of just over $40,000. Gary Kent appeared under the pseudonym Michael Brody in the credits and on the movie poster, due to issues with the Screen Actors Guild labour union. Kent’s wife, Tomi, did Final Girl duties on the film under the name Elaine Warner. The acting is generally a bit wooden, which, I guess, given the title, is appropriate. The rest of the cast were mostly made up of soap actors. Top billed Dean Russell’s only other credit was as a one-and-done doctor in the TV soap ONE LIFE TO LIVE in 1982. Ann Wilkinson had a small role in the soap SANTA BARBARA, but went on to appear in Ulli Lommel’s supernatural slasher sequel REVENGE OF THE BOGEYMAN (akaBOGEYMAN II) in 1983. Jeanette O’Connor, who played the mother of the ghost kids, had the longest career and is still acting today. She also had a small role in the post-SCREAM slasher movie THE BACKLOT MURDERS (2002).

Don Jones claims THE FOREST was shot for video (although that seems unlikely given the October 1980 shooting dates). The director struggled to secure enough money to finish and edit the film (he even lost his house making it), but eventually secured funding, which led to a small US cinema run from April 1983 in California by Commedia Pictures. Later that year, it got released in New York under the title TERROR IN THE FOREST by Fury Films and was still in regional release in North and South Carolina in the summer of 1984. As with some low-budget slashers, it wasn’t screened for critics, and I haven’t been able to find any newspaper reviews from that time. It went to find its natural home on video in both the United States and the UK (where it was trimmed by 22 seconds of some of its grislier moments).
 
I first saw THE FOREST back on an appalling pan-and-scan VHS transfer some 20 years or so ago, which definitely coloured my view of it. Seeing it now, how the director intended certainly improves things a bit, but not enough to lure me back into these particular woods anytime soon.     

BODY COUNT 7: 
Female 3 / Male 4

1. Male is stabbed in the stomach
2. Female has her throat cut
3. Female is stabbed and has her throat cut
4. Female is strangled and hits her head on bedside table
5. Male has his throat pushed onto a circular saw
   
6. Male is drowned
7. Male is stabbed to death

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