The greatest movie ever!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

I don't know what it is about this movie but i sure am addicted to it, watching this movie is a real pleasure for me, not sure if its the incredible scenery, the music or the actors but this wonderful sense of peace and well being comes over me as i watch, so simple yet so effective, i just love to watch this little gem on a hot summer night, give it a try,it works for me!! Nothing beats a good horror set in the forest and this one gets it right, original story far more interesting then the usual slasher, much better then "don't go in the woods alone" which is basically a comedy. Gary Kent is fantastic as the cave dwelling hermit. Why this movie gets bashed all the time is beyond me, I have seen SO much worse,,congratulations Don Jones on making this unique movie!!

The movie starts with a pair of campers, a man and a woman presumably together, hiking alone in the vast wilderness. Sure enough the man hears something and it pangs him so much he goes to investigate it. Our killer greets him with a stab to the stomach. He then chases the girl and slashes her throat. The camera during the opening scene is from the point of view as the killer.We next meet our four main characters, two couples, one in which is on the rocks. The men joke about how the woman would never be able to handle camping alone at a double date, sparking the token blonde's ambition to leave a week early. Unexpectedly, the men leave the same day and their car breaks down.. They end up arriving in the evening. When the men arrive, they are warned about people disappearing in the forest by a crazy Ralph doppleganger. They ignore the warning and venture into the blackening night and an eighties song plays in the background with lyrics about being murdered in the dark forest. The men get lost.In the next scene we realize that this isn't just another The Burning clone, but a ghost story! The women, scared and lonely are huddling together by the fire. Two children appear in the shadows and decide to play peeping Tom. Well they are obviously ghosts by the way their voices echo! Their mother appears with blood dripping from a hole in her forehead and asks the two ladies if they've seen her children, before disappearing of course. The children run home to papa and tell him about the two beautiful ladies by the river. This causes quite a stir and he gets up, grabbing his knife from atop the fireplace. "Daddy's going hunting," The little girl, exclaims with bad acting. It is apparent here, that the dad isn't a ghost like his children.Freaked out by something in the woods, the token blonde splits, running blindly into the night, carrying a knife. She encounters the father who explains he's starving and it will be quick. This doesn't make sense because of the panther growls we heard earlier (Maybe he's allergic! Are panthers honestly even in California?) She ends up wounding him slightly before getting stabbed in the head. A thunderstorm erupts and the men seek shelter, which turns out to be where papa resides. Clearly someone lives here because there's a fire and something weird is roasting over it. The children appear and warn them of papa, who shows up moments later. They disappear as soon as he arrives.For whatever reason, our killer only goes after females. He invites the men to have something to eat and tells us the story about his ex wife. We are given a flashback of his wife getting caught cheating. The old man doesn't tell them however that he kills her and her lover afterwards, but daydreams about it. We aren't given the reason for the children's demise. The men go to sleep and are left unharmed. The next morning the men discover the empty campground of their wives. After a brief discussion they split up. One is to stay at the campsite, while the other goes and gets help. The one that is going back to his car breaks his leg. We are then reunited with the children as they explain to the surviving woman that they are ghosts who killed themselves from being sad about their mother. They agree to help the woman reunite with her friendsThe following scene defies the logic of the movie when papa kills the guy waiting at the campsite. He was also dating or married to the blonde. Somehow the children realize he is murdered and tell the woman about it. She decides to see it for herself and obviously runs into the killer. Luckily the children make him stop by threatening to leave him forever. You know where this is going.Overall the movie deserves four stars out of ten, and that's being generous. For all its misgivings, the musical score is well done. It's still watchable too. There are some camera angles that look professional, and some of the sets are done well. The plot is unbelievable. There is such a thing as willing suspension of disbelief, but with the toad 6 miles away; I can't imagine the token blonde would take off like that in the middle of the night. I mean, come on!Alan "Skip" Bannacheck

A truly disturbed, cannibalistic psychopath, John(Gary Kent, under the pseudonym Michael Brody) who lives in a cave, stalks campers who make the unfortunate mistake of backpacking in his wilderness. Steve(Dean Russell)and his buddy Charlie(John Batis)get into a playful argument with their wives, Sharon(Tomi Barrett, the late real-life wife of Gary Kent))& Teddi(Ann Wilkinson)over surviving in the woods camping by themselves. To prove a point, the gals decide to head for the wilderness out of Los Angeles for a camping trip disturbing their partners to the point that they soon follow afterward. Falling prey to John, Teddi is soon killed as Sharon runs for her life as the men arrive late to the wilderness due to their truck's overheating. Afraid, tired, and paranoid, Sharon receives some very unusual assistance..John's ghost children! That's right, John's children remain in the wilderness, ghostly apparitions which spy on those who exist in the woods, taking a special liking to Sharon, helping guide her to safety and her friends. Meanwhile, Steve and Charlie soon find shelter from a down pour and the darkness of night in the very cave where John lives. Cooking over a burning fire, the meat simmering is actually from Charlie's wife, Teddi! Unknowingly Charlie eats from the meat when offered by John who finds the outsiders inside his dwelling place! Anyway, soon, worried about their wives, Steve and Charlie set out to find them as morning breaks. Meanwhile, John goes a hunting, with Charlie, Steve, and Sharon in a fight for survival. When Steve suffers a compound fracture stumbling between two massive rocks over a flowing river, he will be handicapped only increasing such an already nightmare scenario, with Sharon following her ghostly young friends to potential safety..they even, at one point, plead with their father to not kill her. Charlie, unfortunately, doesn't have such friends.Director Donald Jones(..who also wrote it and went broke funding the film)smartly shoots the film in such a breathtaking, gorgeous location in the Sequoia National Park, in California, where those gargantuan trees tower to great heights, and I basically watch backwoods slashers for this very purpose. For some strange reason, I didn't particularly find Jones' direction of the setting very atmospheric..the dread was missing, although there are some rather disturbing attacks by John using his knife(..shot in a clever way, Jones' camera suggests more than what is actually on screen, yet, somehow, still achieves that gasp at what John is doing to victims). Within such a picturesque landscape, to see innocents preyed upon by a maniac, that kind of increases the terror. City folk attempting to spend a nice few days in a different place, to smell the clean, fresh air, enjoy the sights of a lovely view, only to find themselves stalked by a creepy predator with a very intimidating knife. Providing the back-story to why John is the monster he is, Jones allows us to witness his memory flashback in discovering his wife's adultery and reacting accordingly(..she is also a ghost in the wilderness looking for her children, wishing to punish them for "being naughty")killing both her and the lover in bed(..a refrigerator repairman). The children, sad and depressed committed suicide and now "haunt" the wilderness, still interacting with their pa or whoever they so choose. I realize such a novelty as ghost children in a backwoods slasher is unique and appreciated by some, but I found the idea rather hokey and too silly to take serious. They do help our heroine escape a few potentially dangerous situations, but it was awfully hard for me to keep from giggling uncontrollably. The music I found hideously 80's and the performances aren't mind-blowing. I mean I could react to the situation they were in, because it is indeed quite terrifying to find yourselves in an unfamiliar and hostile territory being hunted by someone who knows the area so well. I think the film is similar in many ways to DON'T GO INTO THE WOODS..ALONE!, except that THE FOREST has the aforementioned ghost children(..their voices echo when talking to Sharon, their father, or each other). Gary Kent looks like a filthy George Lucas, with tattered clothes, and humanity lost. As I mentioned above, the violence isn't as grisly as what is suggested because director Jones is able to effectively cut away from a great deal of knife penetration, yet the way he stages the set pieces leave you rather unsettled(..such as Teddi's murder, the violence mostly silhouetted on the surface of a nearby huge stone formation, her pleas for John to stop and, once stabbed several times, attempts to crawl away from her predator only to be finished off;a hanging corpse John is skinning). I've seen better and worse of this type of slasher film, it's rather mediocre, at best, with some effectively shot scenery. I don't really think it's particularly memorable, for the exception of the ghost children.

~Spoiler~I watched two forest-themed slasher movies this weekend: Don't Go in the Woods and this one, The Forest. They were both equally bad, but one of them was fun. This one was just plain stupid. The Forest is your usual dreck with campers getting offed one by one by a demented backwoods killer. Unfortunately our demented backwoods killer (played by Gary Kent) is one of the least threatening characters ever! The guy just wants to eat. Can you blame him? The killer in The Forest would be a victim in a movie like Madman or The Burning. That's how menacing he is. On top of that, there is a supernatural angle with the ghosts of his children keeping him company and helping out the campers. Weird. There are plenty of great forest slashers out there; No need to see this one.