Forest of the Dead

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STUDIO: Elite
MSRP: $14.98
RATED: NR
RUNNING TIME: 79 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Feature Commentary w/ director and cast
• Behind-the-scenes featurettes
• Outtakes
• Bonus short film from dir. Brian Singleton

The Pitch

“What I did on my summer vacation . . .”

The Humans

Mark Singleton, Chris Anderson, Erin Brophy, Brandi Boulet, Elaine Cummings, Richard Glasgow, Kevin Norris, Heather Duthie, Dan Shestalo, Miles Finlayson.

The Nutshell

Once upon a time, a camcorder ventured into the woods with a group of twentysomethings. In the ensuing action, the camera was forced to witness unspeakable horrors of acting, framing, and storytelling. As if that indignity weren’t enough, some unkind soul ripped the images from it like entrails from a slaughtered pig, chopped them up, reassembled them, and now displays them to you in some eldritch rite of foresight. In them, you can see the end of days.


Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the director.

The Lowdown

I don’t buy that it’s difficult to criticize bad movies. In my tenure here at CHUD, I’ve willingly endured quite a few wretched leavings of cinema, from unsuccessful sequels to failed comedies to racing films shot against a brick wall backdrop. I’ve never believed that the criticisms I write are intended for anything more than your entertainment, but I try and dig at the foundations of whatever I’m watching, to find what elements of skill were present in the process. For bad movies, that digging just takes a little longer, and doesn’t smell very pleasant. Sometimes there are dead possums.

The point being that it’s not hard to stand up to a bad movie with red pen in hand; it might even be too easy, which inspires all kinds of lazy writing. Sometimes, though, it is pointless. I’m having a real crisis, here. Forest of the Dead is an awful movie, shot in a carnival of different exposures, with unfunny jokes and bad acting unmitigated by how intentionally bad they are. There are scads of criticisms that I could level against it. But why?


The Morningstar is displeased.

Here are the reasons, as I see them, for criticizing a tiny, horrible movie:

1) To warn others away. I am such an altruist. I will watch a shitty movie so you don’t have to! In all seriousness, some people take the advice of two-bit critics such as myself seriously enough to veer away from the horror rack at Blockbuster if they see a title that has been panned. I, for example, frequently substitute critical opinion for my own, and consequently haven’t rented Gothika yet.

2) For humorous purposes. I am not Mike, Tom Servo, or Crow. Lampooning a bad movie can be cathartic, but it’s rarely ever useful, or worthwhile. Unless you’re trying to score readership based on cleverness. That’d be a bad place for me to place my bank.

3) To supply advice to the filmmakers (or similar filmmakers). Here’s the gray area. Whether cruel or kind, accurate criticism of small, bad movies has a greater potential of reaching the filmmakers than similar does of making it to the desks of the big names. Therefore, criticism of a bad movie might conceivably be intended as the first part of a dialogue with the filmmakers. Criticism intended to expose modes and means of improving one’s art and/or craft? Bizarre.

4) For the aggregate benefit of the critical community, or to add to the lexicon of critical techniques. Nope, that’s not it.

5) I don’t understand. We have a winner!


Gonna kill ya, and then gonna steal your hair.

So, take the less-caustic part of number 3, and couch it in the language of number 1, and you have what I tend to write, by accident rather than intention.

Forest of the Dead? It made me want to get up, grab a few friends and a camcorder, drive up into the mountains and bullshit our own horror tale. Not because it was so well done, or evoked the thrill of spontaneous creativity, but because through the whole picture one thought was never far from the very front of my mind:

“I could do something better than this.”

I can’t, of course. That’s a big ol’ fallacy that plenty of armchair critics fall into. At the same time, from the victim’s point of view, there’s the competing fallacy that people who haven’t created X can not criticize X.

Trying to avoid fallaciousness as much as possible, while maximizing the number of times I get to write the word “fallaciousness,” I’ll stick with my admission that I could not make a better film that Forest of the Dead given the same cast, crew, equipment, and fake accents. I also am of the opinion that the filmmakers could have made a better film given the same et cetera. Why? Because the half-assed male characters, sporadic changes in the camp meter, and dissociated action editing are all qualities that could be improved with a bit more preproduction and thought.


When I was eight, I accidentally killed a cat, and then stared at it
for the rest of the afternoon. I don't know why I felt the compulsion to admit that.

I say this because there is talent obvious in Forest of the Dead, when it comes to effects and makeup. On an obviously tiny budget, renaissance man Brian Singleton pulled off some darn good gore: eviscerations, beheadings, immolations, and more. The blood changes consistency here and there, more convincing in some shots than in others, but for the most part it’s admirable effort.

The overriding trouble is that, for a film that was obviously fun to make, it’s not much fun to watch. It’s not just the quality of the acting (awful, to reiterate, whether intentional or not) or of the photography; good storytelling practices are tossed away, along with the understanding that good storytelling creates the tension on which visceral thrills capitalize.

As a frame for a demonstration of potential talent and tenacity, Forest of the Dead is solid enough, but it doesn’t have feet, much less legs, as a film.


Monsters never have monocles. Why is that?

The Package

The cover art grabbed me nicely. I’m a sucker for hand-drawn anything in this time of floating heads and lighting effects.

The bonus materials are, without exception, more fun than the actual movie. I think it’s because the enthusiasm for the project is much more evident (though backhanded, at times) directly from the mouths of the cast and crew than in the movie itself. An energetic commentary kicks things off with director Brian Singleton and some of his crew, though apparently it was recorded inside of a tin can; additionally, you get a trio of featurettes which are fun for their showing how a somewhat informal production like this reflects the traditional obstacles of filmmaking in behind-the-scenes, special effects, and sound design.

There’s also a set of outtakes, certifiably funnier than most of the jokes in the script, and a short film from Singleton, the title of which ought to give you a better idea of the quality of Forest of the Dead than I have in my hundreds of words: “Return of the Dastardly Zombie Vampire Mummy from Planet X.”

Hell, yes. Keep shining, you crazy Canadians.

3 out of 10