The Forest [1982]

Deciding to go camping, two young women go ahead of their husbands (also buddies) to a certain wilderness outside San Diego...what the four of them doesn't expect is a psychopath and his ghost children living within the great outdoors!
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Basically, director Don Jones wants to set up the opening of The Forest (1982) to establish that “there’s a killer in the woods”, with a couple getting the knife. Slashers, backwoods or not, often set the stage with that opening kill (or two) to let us know what the cast is in for once the movie lands them into the location of the psychopath.

Two couples decide to venture out of the smog, traffic, and heat of San Diego for a little camping trip, heading into the “great outdoors” to get away from it all, unknowingly casting their tent into area of a killer. The wives feel  obligated by pride to prove their husbands that they can make it on their own in the woods, leaving them behind (the husbands feel  a bit concerned about them going into the woods on their own, but the girls feel that this is to reinforce their opinion that they can without any help from men). The husbands will come up later. The ladies arrive, Sharon notices no hikers or people in the area, the guys are sidetracked by a radiator hole needing plugged, and the trip through the woods begins. Not much happens of any note as twenty minutes ticks by. It is all about getting the characters to the woods, but this might test the patience of low attention spans.

The film soon goes off the deep end unexpectedly as the wilderness' killer has a ghost wife looking for her ghost children! The members of the cast actually can see and talk to them! The kids are bored after a little watching the ladies by the campfire all creeped out and wanting their husbands to find them.

Then the dark humor of the plot arrives with a twisted, sick detail involving the killer's cannibalistic ways, apologizing to a victim he plans to kill, cook, and eat by explaining that he is hungry! She obviously doesn't want to die and become his meal, but Kent ultimately prevails. While the attack and kill isn't particularly shown in graphic detail, the victim stabbed in the back (Jones opts to show the silhouettes of Kent and his victim in reflections by shadow on a mountainous wall), crawling helplessly on the ground, her friend having hit the bricks (the victim deciding to stay at the campsite around the fire), unable to move much, continuing to endure the knife until she can no longer sustain the violence, soon succumbing to her wounds. When a husband unknowingly eats a piece of his wife at Kent's offering (not knowing it is human meat cut from his wife!), soon getting a horrible chill, this is the ultimate example at the humor at its darkest. It kind of makes you wonder if this was intentionally sick and twisted.

The slasher film is known for its flashback to "where it all began." It provides the reasoning behind the madness. Gary Kent's psychopathic forest-dwelling cannibal was once just an everyman, an average joe who went off the deep end thanks to his wife's open, blatant infidelity, flaunting it in his face (and sticking their son and daughter in the closet to boot!). Choking her before slamming his wife forehead-first into the nearby nightstand, he then goes after the lover, using an outside circular saw blade to finish him off (the lover was able to avoid a hacksaw and pitchfork, but this was still to no avail). Soon the kids get sick and commit suicide (!), leaving Kent all alone. Their ghosts haunt the woods, Kent's wife looking for her "naughty" children (they continue to elude her), saying they need to be punished. I have to say I thought this business with the family of ghosts was just nuts. It does add a unique spin on the backwoods slasher, but those kids popping up and talking to Sharon, the heroine, even coming to her aid at one point (!) when Kent closes in on the kill (threatening to abandon him if he killer their friend), just had me shaking my head quizzically. Jones applies a slight voice echo to when they talk that indicates they're "different". Kent remains almost expressionless. In fact, I can't recall, even as he is on the attack, ever breaking from that stone faced coldness. Kent is one of those actors that is a bit aloof... is it intentionally cold or just a non-actor keeping himself from having to perform? He stays in this same performance, though. Maybe his humanity is gone and the primal savage needing food to survive is all that's left? Am I giving Kent too much credit? Was this on purpose, to play the character blank because he lost his humanity?

Charlie and Steve (John Batis and Dean Russell) are the buddies trying to find their wives, with the damned woods throwing them for a loop. Gary Kent’s forest killer doesn't help matters because he butchered Teddi (Ann Wilkinson) and has Sharon (Tomi Barrett) on the lam (often hiding or following Kent's ghost children). Charlie and Steve have fallen to such a tormented anxiety level, they fight and bicker, determining that the only way to solve this current crisis is to split up; Charlie will stay at camp and Steve will go for help. Both suffer for this decision. Charlie puts up quite a fight with Kent but the river takes him when he's eventually overpowered and drowned (Charlie is shown hanging from a tree, his throat cut, Kent cutting away with that bloody knife!), while Steve trips over one of the forest's huge boulders and breaks his leg (a bone is protruding, with Steve using a stick as a crutch, taking a moment to get a good pitiable cry). Only the children helping Sharon can perhaps stop this madman before no one is left.

I can't say that this is a good movie at all. The murders are spread in twos throughout the film. There's a decent throat slicing, but director Jones has to take shortcuts to avoid showing much on screen grue. The pace is a bit sluggish. Lots of walking around in the woods lost. The woods, throughout Jones' film, are exploited well as a maze that can be easily lost in, with Kent and his kids the ones who know how to move about it. Sharon is the typical resourceful heroine, hiding in the right places up until she chats with the kids and Kent comes from behind her. Because Sharon makes friends with the kids they rescue her from certain death. Kent is shown looking and looking for Sharon, eventually giving up to feed on the cooked meat cut from the body of Teddi. He tells Charlie that he needs food for the winter, providing the reason why he must kill him! People will use "cheesy" to describe this film basically because of the ghost kids and the odd music that accompanies certain scenes (some of the music seems taken from television shows in the 70s) and action. It takes a while to get to Teddi's death at Kent's hands, but then there's a good bit before Charlie winds up hanging from a tree, fit for fileting. Sure the flashback offers the wife and lover as two more that Kent gets to kill, but none of them are all that potent or gut-wrenching. The murder of the lover seems played for comedic effect...the way Jones frames the weapons and how Kent just can't quite get a hold of him. The wife looking for her children and how they intersperse with the alive characters in the woods also is just surreal. The cast, although clearly non-actors,  don't embarrass themselves too much, which helps. This isn't the slasher the box cover suggests (that was a damn good box cover, too), though, as the killer isn't that extraordinary and his savagery doesn't leave you startled or too shaken. Sure a young woman crawling across the ground in some failed attempt to escape her assaulter is rather disturbing and her husband later dangling from a tree like hog meat could be unnerving to some, but overall that's not a patch on a pitchfork plunging into a naked woman in a shower as she achingly dies in pain (The Prowler) or garden shears impaling a raft full of teenagers (The Burning). Kent looks like a homeless man on high levels of medication for depression and stress, totally zoning out, but with a knife and blank face, he's hungry and no human is safe from being cooked over his cavernous open fire. Here is a slasher that shows that in order to halt the monster and his hunger for human flesh is through ghost children offering assistance. Yep, a little different.