Well Deserved Praise

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Blistering performances.

Well I had been searching for this movie for over a year before I finally got my hands on it. Afterall this movie is from Sweden and I live in the US.I had heard the rumors: Blair Witch Project copycat. This statement is not entirely true though... There is a lot of simularties, and its obvious that the director was heavily inspired by Blair.. But this one is good enough to stand on its own.No ghosts, no aliens (you don't actually see any kind of creature other then the dead chicken looking thing in the beginning).. This movie relies on suspense alone. Was there something out in those woods that made these 5 scientists go insane? We don't get the answer.What irritates me the most here is that the movie is shot with a shaky handcam... yet there is no explanation of it. Why is the movie shot like this when there isn't a 6th person with them shooting the footage? I honestly think adding a cameraman to the story would be more reasonable then the shakeyness for no reason... you can even see the cameraman's shadow at one point.. come on now, if you're gonna ride on Blair's success at least go all the way with it.Other then that - a perfect horror movie.

I write this because all my friends hate this movie, ..think if it would have happened to you and your friends in real, then it would be very scary!. Myself i think this is a movie with good atmosphere, spookie characters and a nice place to do a horror film in - The Wood. A rental is it well worth, i think this is a love or hate movie just like the movie "Natural Born Killers" ;-- love this flick too :)

It's bad enough to see a film that's so totally derivative of a film like "The Blair Witch Project" (which I found a yawn, anyway), but to then add insult to injury by adding the key premise of "Alien", to the plot, is not only absolutely ludicrous, but an insult to viewers. Through directors like Ingmar Bergman, Sweden has produced world-class cinema. This film, "The Unknown", has set the Swedish Film Industry back decades.

Five young biologists are sent to the northern regions of Sweden to investigate a forest fire. They will live in a caravan and tents out in the woods for some weeks, while they perform some tests. But something does not smell right... Soon they find a peculiar and burned carcass, which kind of look like an animal, only not. But this is just the beginning. Pretty soon, the biologists start behaving strange, one by one. Against their will, they have walked into the unknown...At first, "Det Okända", or "The Unknown" in English, was accused of being a Blair Witch-rip off, but those were actually the words of the people who had seen the trailer and not the film itself. The trailer looks pretty much like The Blair Witch Project, but the movie is very different. It might have been a bad idea to market the movie in this way, which might be one of the reasons that the movie didn´t do that well at the Swedish theaters. No, "Det Okända" is more like the masterpiece "The Thing", by John Carpenter, in which you never really knew who you could trust. The only things that reminds of BWP are the location and the shaky hand cameras. In fact, "Det Okända" is better than BWP in all ways. Better acting (all the actors are great), it´s much scarier and the script is more interesting and suggestive. It feels like a classic B-movie, really. It´s not just the best Swedish horror movie I´ve ever seen, it´s actually one of the best Swedish films ever!Camping will never be the same. * * * * out of * * * * *