Too much of everything

Excellent but underrated film

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

This is a made for TV SyFy movie. A group of tourists are tricked into entering a realm filled with the characters from Grimm's fairy tales, with some slight modifications such as the seven dwarfs being cannibals. The film seems to be geared toward kids with some mild swearing. As they search for a missing infant, the stories take their toll.

Now this is more like it. The Syfy original "Black Forest" actually shows that these productions can surprise and what we got was passable entertainment. Asinine, but enjoyable. What it makes up for in its low- budget, is in its concept creativity. Sure the execution is quite so-so and the CGI can be flat and laughable, but the atmospherics do work because of its well-etched production designs. Creating a fairytale world brought up many possibilities to explore and these disjointed stories involving wolves, fairies, dwarfs, witches and trolls do come alive. These aren't your friendly childhood stories, as some unlucky tourists find themselves getting lost in a magical forest in Germany and trying to stay alive by not becoming apart of the story. How to keep that from happening; sticking to the tradition of the fairy-tales. The script might be cheesy, but the story stays intriguing and creates some amusing, off-the-wall scenarios. I do think that the first half setting up the fantastical predicament is much stronger than the second half where things get senseless as the tourists are trying to figure a way out. The performances are agreeable despite their leaden characters with abeyant Ben Cross being the name grabber. Humour can be a little self- knowing, but it's not a distraction. One thing I noticed was the music theme that was constantly played resembled that of the 1987 "Predator". Better than expected SyFy original. "Let's hope there's no wicked witch inside".

I've seen a far few SyFy films and watched this one with quite a bit on fast forward. It was though quite good fun and had some interesting ideas with some good performances,e.g.Cazmar and The Doctor, and attempts at a decent storyline. The main let down were the effects and some of the performances that were poor and unconvincing. This is a shame as the story had real potential and the initial premise was very strong. It was good to have a movie set outside of America and that played with conventions so much more than normal. There was a good, scary, effective movie hiding away in this and it is a shame that it got buried! Worth watching, but only just.

I admit I dislike most of SyFy's movies, and was not expecting much watching Black Forest. However, while it was not exactly a great movie, it was one of SyFy's better and more tolerable efforts.SyFy does deserve kudos for thinking up such a good and original concept, a real departure from the typical creature, disaster and fantasy films dreamt up that a vast majority of the time are badly done. I enjoyed some scenes, my favourite being the seven cannibal dwarfs attired like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, though the scenes with the spiders from Little Miss Muppet, the Troll Under the Bridge and the Witch and her Gingerbread house also stood out. The acting while nothing extraordinary was a notch above other SyFy efforts(where it feels phoned in or shockingly bad such as recently Annihilation Earth), with nobody toe-curlingly bad really. Ben Cross looks as though he is really enjoying himself as villain Cazmar. I also loved the production design, especially that for the forest which is rich in colour.However, some of the characters still annoyed me, by all means they are not as blatantly stereotypical as some of SyFy's other movies(in in disaster movies like Miami Magma or something like that) but there are at least three that struck me as too stupid to live sort of characters. Also, while the concept was great and there were some scenes that were memorable and surprisingly satisfying, the overall story at times has a very scatter-shot feel and there are some scenes that don't really make much sense. The dialogue is on the cheesy and lame side, and while the effects are miles above effects seen in Titanic II for example, I got the sense that a lot of work went into the production design but the lacking budget caused the effects to not have the quality they could've done.Overall, one of SyFy's better efforts but still flawed. 5/10 Bethany Cox