Well, after the fiasco of dealing with The Sorority's crappy DVD, I was a little apprehensive about getting another low-budget slasher. However, The Forest at least PLAYED on my laptop, so there's already 1 point in its' favor. The bad news? No sound. *(see footnote after the recap)
SPOILERS follow, possibly...but only if I'm the world's luckiest guesser...
Okay, so I'm going to have to GUESS what's going on.....ready? The silent movie begins with a couple at what looks like a national park, hiking. The credits are shown as they hike. Exciting. Oh, the movie stars such luminaries as Stafford Morgan(wasn't he a savings & loan?), Tony Gee(I hope he married Louise Whiz!), and Corky Pigeon. I shit you not, that's someone's actual name. Dear god, this one may destroy my fragile mind.
The woman hears a noise. Lucky for her. I never get to! We get a few POV shots of the killer watching the couple. Again, the woman hears "something", or maybe her Spidey sense is tingling. Who knows? As they (hilariously!) decide to hike faster, the killer runs behind them from one hiding spot to another. Looking constipated, the woman freaks out. The guy tells her to go behind tree and use a pine cone to wipe with I guess. She begs him for HIS feminine hygiene products and he agrees. She stomps off, and he gets a knife to the gut THE SECOND she goes offscreen. Or maybe the crotch. He's wearing so much friggin' denim, it's hard to tell.
Debbie Downer comes back, and finds the body. Increasing the frown to Chloe-on-24-like proportions, she panics and begins running. The killer apparently has very little depth perception, as he stabs a tree instead of her. Then, in a move that would have impressed Houdini, our killer grabs her from behind a tree, while showing her the knife IN FRONT OF the tree. And she couldn't outrun this rocket scientist WHY??? He shows her the knife before stabbing her to death.
The movie then switches to a montage of traffic jams. Again, no joke. We get to watch scene after endless scene of cars bumper-to-bumper in heavy traffic. Fun times. 2 guys who look like Robert Reed(the dad on The Brady Bunch) and Rick Springfield(has-been rockstar) or maybe Adrian Zmed(T.J. Hooker) are sitting in the traffic jam. Mike Brady has his arm on the back of pseudo-Zmed's seat, making me wonder if it actually IS Reed(although he played the family man on Brady, Reed was gay in real-life). The guys are apparently NOT them, because they pick up their wives and take them to Papa Gino's.
At the restaurant, no one notices Mike Brady's head smoking. They're too busy pretending to give a crap about something one of the girls is saying. She looks like a cross between Kirsten Dunst and a Muppet. The other girl tries flirting with Mike Brady, and he just tells her "something suddenly came up". Hey, no sound and it's my recap: they say what I tell 'em to. The girls get really drunk, probably after realizing this movie will bring their acting careers to a grinding halt, and Mike Brady demonstrates how he used to put Bobby to bed.
Breaking your date's ribs is apparently not a good idea, because the next scene shows the girls packing their suitcases to try their luck as showgirls instead of Hollywood starlets. ZmedHead kisses Muppet-girl, and the other one stares dreamily into Brady's eyes while reminding herself to get a blood test done the minute she gets home. The SECOND the girls leave, the 2 guys hold hands and plan a trip together. Geez, what the hell kinda movie did I rent? They have the most boring car-chase in history, which ends with the guys giving up the chase to stop at a gas station. It's probably the gas station most of them ended up working at after making this movie.
At the gas station the guys run into Andy Richter's dad. He agrees to look over their job applications if the whole "movie star" thing doesn't pan out. While the guys are re-thinking their future, the girls(let's call 'em Thelma and Louise....Thelma can be the Muppet.) arrive at THE FOREST! Louise puts on a vest made out of Leslie Nielsen's back-hair, and off they go. As the guys are FINALLY finishing their job interviews, Thelma and Louise walk past the tree that the Keebler elves all live in. They climb rocks, they jump over logs--hey, I guess all those feminine hygiene ads were right! Although I can't hear the dialogue, I'm willing to bet it went something like:
THELMA: Where the hell are we?????
LOUISE: i dunno, the film crew left about 3 hours ago. If cell phones ever get invented, maybe we can call a cab.
The guys end up on one of those narrow, winding roads that only ever seem to exist in this type of movie. They somehow find the girls' vehicle and park next to it, as the girls are setting up camp waaaaay the eff away. The guys put on backpacks and pretend to be David Naughton and Griffin Dunne in An American Werewolf In London. They meet the poor man's Burt Reynolds, moonlighting as a State Trooper, and he looks about as useless as the REAL Burt. Having no trail to follow or way to let the girls know they've arrived, the guys decide to just start walking in a random direction. That works out about as well as you'd imagine.
Cue nightfall. The girls are discussing the possibility of becoming lesbian cave hermits, if their boyfriends don't arrive soon. While they dreamily contemplate throwing each other into the fire they built, 2 ghost-children, a boy and a girl, show up. Again, I'm not screwing with your minds, this actually happens. They look like refugees from the Little House On the Prairie set. Who are they? Beats me. The boy apparently wants to have a little camp-orgy, but the ghost-girl doesn't seem into it. He tells her about his blue balls, and Thelma and Louise figure out that they're not alone.
ANOTHER ghost shows up, this time a woman. She has a scratch where Bill Clinton's desk apparently hit her forehead. Wow, what a crappy way to die. She warns Thelma and Louise about accepting internships in Washington and POOF! she vanishes. The girls decide to start attending AA meetings and try to leave their campsite, but are blocked by a moth. Oooooh, scary!
The guys get tired of wandering around in the dark, and decide to just let the killer get the girls. At the same time, the ghost-kids go talk to their dad, who turns out to be Will Sasso's version of Kenny Rogers. He picks up a knife and decides to take care of the girls, all while singing "Kill the Wabbit" under his whiskey-strong breath. After holding a knife above one of the girls for about a fortnight, she FINALLY wakes up and sees...the ghost-kids again. Damn. They warned Thelma and Louise, dagnabbit!! No fair!
Thelma and Louise decide the best course of action would be to stand up and just look around like the 2 useless meatbags they are. Louise runs off after a Shatneresque scene of emoting and rubbing ghost-blood off her forehead. Give that gal an Oscar....Mayer weiner.
Kenny chases one girl, but she outwits him with her knack for general stupidity. He goes after the one who stayed behind instead, making no attempt to hide or sneak up on her. She somehow STILL manages to miss seeing him approach RIGHT BESIDE HER. She does finally notice the crazy old man holding the knife, and reacts by just standing there. Dingbat. He stabs AT her several times, but I guess we have to use our imaginations, because other than a few fake blood-stains, there doesn't seem to be a mark on her. Even while slitting her throat the camera switches to a different angle. Laaaaame.
Louise sees her die and decides to run around, in the dark, in THE FOREST the killer knows like the back of his hand. Smart. Kenny chases her, and the chase is so long, they go from night to day. Rather than let him get her, Louise jumps down a waterfall and makes a swim for the opposite embankment. Kenny watches her for a minute, then chooses to go back to fetch Thelma before pursuing her.
The guys(remember them?) are still standing in the middle of nowhere, ooh-ing and ahhh-ing over a compass. A COMPASS. Dumbasses. It starts raining, and I pause to wonder if the movie heard me wish bad luck upon them. The dingleberries find shelter in a cave, and it's the cave Kenny lives in. OF COURSE. They briefly grope each other's chests, only to find the ghost-kids watching them. Before they can traumatize the kids too much, Kenny comes back. He decides to invite them to dinner, apparently forgetting that he's in a slasher movie.
While chowing down on Thelma's ribs, Kenny tells them about his plan to open a chain of restaurants, and call them Kenny Roger's Roasters, using campers as the main course. Wisely, the guys decide to turn down his offer and refuse to invest in his business plan. In a weirdly placed flashback scene, Kenny is shown walking in on his wife and her lover, a repairman of some kind. They were having an affair, and had been forcing his kids into the bedroom closet while they screwed each others' brains out.
He chokes the wife to death, and knocks her forehead into the bedside table, which explains the blood on her forehead as a ghost. He then goes to stab the lover to death, but they end up brawling instead. In a chase scene that defies logic, the boyfriend keeps escaping the killer, only to find the killer has somehow managed to get ahead of him again, each time brandishing a new weapon. HUH???
Whatever. The killer eventually corners the wife's lover and forces him up against a circular saw, imbedding the teeth of it into the guy's chest. The kids watch him bury the bodies, and then he drags them away, presumably to kill them as well. Hey, I'm doing pretty damn good for a guy with no sound.
The Idiot Brothers decide to spend the night. Because no one would refuse shelter from a guy who just told them that he murdered his family and then became a cannibal. Yeah, pull the OTHER leg, movie. Further solidifying my belief that they are Robert Reed and Adrian Zmed, the 2 doofuses (doofii?) sleep together on the floor in adjoining sleeping bags. They even have a very "Brady" talk before bed. Yeesh.
They somehow survive the night, and pack up early the next morning to leave. Ol' Whatsherface also wakes up the next morning, after having slept under a rock. Good hiding place, soon-to-be-dead-chick!
The guys waste more screentime searching the rocks for the girls. Why the rocks? Who knows? Who cares? They eventually find the campsite, with no sign of Thelma or Louise. They backtrack to Kenny's cave, which is also now empty. Louise, while aimlessly wandering around in THE FOREST!!!!!!, sees the ghost kids again. They distract her long enough for Kenny to catch up, because that just makes no effing sense in the least. (At this point, my laptop still didn't give me the movie's volume, but an annoying whistle started up. Great.)
Anyway, Louise slides down a hill. She hides just as Kenny shows up, and she chooses rocks and trees that don't conceal her very much at all. I say let Kenny kill the chick. Do the world a favor, Kenny. Kill a dumbass, and save us from this cheap-ass movie. The movie then grinds to a halt so we can watch the guys do laundry. I swear.
The killer has found Louise, and while she's hiding under some rocks, he's sitting above them, waiting for her to emerge. She must've made a sound or something, because he stops gnawing on her friend's flesh to look around a bit. Dude, you got some Thelma stuck in yer teeth.
Mike Brady leaves, probably to get help, and leaves Zmed-for-brains at the campsite. In case the girls come back, I guess. Oh, and ZmedHead now has a headband. ZmedHead, I dub thee Rambozo!
Brady injures himself in the dumbest way possible and has a piece of bone poking up through his leg. He ain't going anywhere. The ghost-kids meet up with Louise, probably to discuss why late '70's/early '80's fashion sucked so much. Kenny hears them and decides to keep tracking his prey.
Brady stops hop-limping away, so that he can have himself a good, manly cry. Night falls, and Rambozo waits for someone to find him. "Someone" turns out to be the killer's wife. She freaks out Rambozo before vanishing. Rambozo is further unsettled by the approach of the killer, even though they appear to be in different time zones(Rambozo's scenes are at night, by the fire; Kenny's scenes are in daylight.)
Kenny does exactly what he did before: he walks out in plain view, and waits for his victim to miss seeing him. Luckily, our guy is(barely) smarter than Thelma was. They scuffle, and both men drop their weapons. Rambozo seems to have the upper hand, until they both fall in the water. The cannibal drowns him.
While wandering around, Louise encounters the kids again. She lets them lead her to safety, and instead they take her right to the spot where the killer is preparing to cut up Rambozo. Nice kids. She freaks out, and the killer hears her. Before he can kill her though, the kids manage to stop him. They then help her to get away, hopefully to find Cryin' Mike Brady.
Using a heavy tree branch as a makeshift crutch, Brady eventually falls down. The killer sees him fall, and begins making his approach. They have a showdown, but Brady is caught off-balance and the killer tries to focus his attacks on the injured leg. With Brady helpless on the ground, the killer swoops in for the finishing move, but Brady rolls away at the last second. Quick recap:A guy evades a mass-murdering hillbilly cannibal by ROLLING SLOWLY AWAY. Then we see Louise grab one of the dropped knives. She lunges at the killer, who sees her as his dead wife and panics. She plunges the knife into his chest, killing him and ending his cannibal murder spree.
The kids show up one last time to say goodbye to the couple. Then the ghost-Mom shows up. Geez, this is turning into Scooby-friggin'-Doo. They tell her the kids are gone, and she whooshes back to the killer's cave. As she watches, he hugs the 2 kids and they all vanish. THE END. During the credits, they show the now-deserted cave, then a scene out in a field. Wow. 1 and a half trees out of 5. The 1's a gift, as thanks for the lack of audio. I can only imagine how dumb this shit would've been if I had to have the full experience....
So, what has this week's crapfest taught me?
-Deafness can be a blessing.
-A movie about a cannibal who slaughters and eats about 8 people can somehow be boring as hell, and almost completely devoid of good kills.
-Adrian Zmed and Robert Reed reallllllly dug each other. Yikes!
I think the next movie coming in is The Watcher, but I'm not going through the hassle of my crappy wireless signal to double-check, so don't hold me to that. See you next week!
*(a quick footnote---towards the end, my laptop overheated and shut down. When I rebooted, the sound on the movie worked again, so I rewatched this thing. While I messed up some of the story with my guesswork---Brady and the "Louise" are married and on the brink of a divorce---frankly, my guesses were more fun than the actual film...Some of the other stuff I got wrong as well, obviously...The kids died of "sadness"? The guy WASN'T their father?? If this POS ever gets remade, they need to re-write most of the "plot", and make the kills more interesting.)
