Skull Forest (2012)

Better Late Then Never

A different way of telling a story

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This is another film in which a professional hunting club, hunts scantily clad females. The film weighs in at 75 minutes. The DVD box claims special features, but my menu didn't have any. The film has bad herky-jerky camera angles, awkward close-ups with cut off heads and faces. The sound during the club meeting had a cheapness to it. On the plus side, the girl on the cover is in the film.Four girls go camping on a get-away weekend, no cell reception, etc. etc. I think you got the picture.F-bomb. No sex. Nudity (Lisa Neeld, Sara Brooks, Pamela Sutch, and did I mention Lisa Neeld?)

I don't know where to begin with Skull Forest. It's a very bad film and looks as if it was made by a bunch of friends who got together and decided to make a movie over the course of a weekend--then post it on YouTube. The camera-work appears to have been done with an iPad or home video camera. Or, if better equipment was used, it was used very badly. I have never seen a film with so many shots that were out of frame, MANY were diagonal, some had heads clipped off the actors and there were entirely too many close-ups—yet these somehow made it past the editing stage! It looks no better than what you or I would do myself...provided we were intoxicated or legally blind. While it did get a little better as the film progressed (mostly, I assumed because whoever was using the camera learned by doing), the beginning especially made me a bit motion sick watching it and folks often looked like they were walking uphill all the time! After reviewing more than 16000 films on IMDb, I can honestly say that this film has the worst camera work of any of the pictures I've reviewed. It's a shame, because the film wasn't 100% terrible—but the camera was so bad I could see most folks giving up on it very quickly.The film is a reworking of the classic story The Most Dangerous Game. It was a dandy B-movie from 1932 that starred Joel McCrea and Fay Wray and it was remade many times in both films and on television. Fortunately, the filmmakers DID credit this at the beginning and I appreciated this. The major difference is that instead of one hunter hunting a couple, this film has a group of women out in the woods for a girls weekend—and they walk into the middle of a bunch of psychos playing paintball—but with real weapons!!! That will sure screw up your weekend! There really isn't a lot of plot beyond that—just contestants in some weirdo ultimate sport killing off early middle-aged women…or, in a few cases, getting killed.So what was good about this film? Well, it wasn't the acting--that was uneven. While some was decent, some actors couldn't really deliver their lines and the director SHOULD have re-shot these scenes. One guy, however, did some really nice martial arts-style stunts near the end. Oddly, the best thing about this film is something which I think is used way too much in movies—the nudity. This is a super-explicit film with lots of nudity—lots. What I appreciated, though, is that these naked looked NORMAL. They were not stick-thin actresses and they looked their age—and didn't seem hung up on showing their bodies. Considering the message we get from films is impossible to meet in real life (no, guys, women do NOT all look like airbrushed Playboy models), it's nice to see a film with normal looking women. However, I am also sure a lot of women would be offended, as the only nekkid folks in the film were women! Plus, if this and a few stunts are the best things I can say about Skull Forest, it really is a terrible film! Don't say I didn't warn you.

For the purpose of full disclaimer I am a huge fan of Killerwolf Films. I love the mixture of horror and action they do so seamlessly. This film is a bit of a departure for them. All of their previous films have had a otherworldly element to it (like werewolves, zombies, vampires, dark spirits or being set after the apocalypse)and this one is definitely set in the real world without any monsters. The film is, in a nutshell, a group of girlfriends go out camping for the weekend and stumble across a human hunt being conducted by a clandestine group of uber rich uber important people (akin to 1994's Surviving the Game). Because they discover the hunt they now become part of it. Some really great performances by Sara Brooks, Pamela Sutch, Lisa Neeld, Melissa Scott, K.K. Ryder, Deanne Visalle, and James Scott Charles Howell. My 2 favorites though were Luc Bernier and Brian Anthony. While this genre is not a favorite of mine it still manages to grab onto me and I want to see what happens to the characters good and bad. One of the signs of a good film for me is when they use a genre I may not favor but do something with that I find I really enjoy and Len Kabasinski is able to do this. A great entry into his list of many films this will appeal to survival horror fans as well as action fans. KWF fans do not want to miss this.

Four female friends embark on a weekend camping expedition into the woods. Things go horribly awry when the quartet runs afoul of a group of wicked rick folks who enjoy hunting humans for sport. Will any of these ladies make it out of the forest alive? Just like "Wendigo," this film stands out as a radical departure for Do-It-Yourself indie movie-maker Len Kabasinski and KillerWolf Films: The narrative has a real mean'n'lean streamlined quality to it, with no lulls, filler, or pretense of any kind; the dark'n'gritty tone doesn't pull any punches, the nudity comes across as more organic and less gratuitous than in previous KillerWolf pictures (in fact, a fair share of said nudity surprisingly isn't erotic at all, as an extremely impressive sequence with a nude gal who's covered in both blood and dirt clawing her way out of the ground confirms), and the take-no-prisoners attitude delivers several genuinely startling moments in which certain characters one initially expects to survive instead wind up meeting brutal untimely ends. Lisa Neeld as the tough Tori, Pamela Sutch as the weary Sara, Melissa Scott as the perky Liz, and especially Sara Brooks as the determined and resourceful Caroline make for strong and sympathetic protagonists. Moreover, the villains are a colorful bunch: Kabasinski as the ruthless Steve Reminger, Brian Anthony as a deadly crooked cop, K.K. Ryder as the vicious Micah Wolfsblood, and Deanna Visalle as formidable Russian Patricia Voldolsky. However, top acting honors easily go to James Scott Charles Howells for his lively and deliciously slimy portrayal of cocky and decadent rock singer Daniel Spinelli, who's kind of like an evil version of Tom Petty. The crisp cinematography makes exciting use of a restless hand-held camera and offers a few beautifully panoramic aerial shots of the woods. Well worth seeing.