‘In the Forest’ Review: Yet Again, City Dwellers Seek Nature but Find Grief
28.01.2022 - 11:03
/ variety.com
Dennis Harvey Film CriticThings like drinking games and “RiffTrax” were invented for movies like “In the Forest,” which are very bad but need a little participatory help to become so-bad-they’re-good. This quasi-horror tale of bickering vacationers running afoul of disturbed locals strings together various well-worn clichés with a notable lack of suspense, plausibility and style, while excelling in the realm of characters behaving like complete idiots. Simultaneous with streaming-platforms release on Jan.
28, Vertical Entertainment is opening Hector Barron’s feature on a couple dozen screens nationwide. That might normally seem a modest number, but in this particular case it represents a considerable leap of faith. Among the bad ideas enthusiastically embraced straight off here is making our ostensible protagonists as irritating as possible.
Senior Stan (Lyman Ward) is piloting the RV as he drives middle-aged daughter Helen (Debbon Ayer) and her young-adult offspring Emily (Cristina Spruell) on a camping vacation intended to give everyone a little tranquil family togetherness. But Helen is a controlling nag, while Emily acts like a bratty child. They’re constantly at each other’s throats, to grandpa’s understandable exasperation.
Why have they chosen this kind of vacation anyway, when none of them even seem to know how to put up a tent, or anything else related to the outdoors?That lack is soon rendered irrelevant when an angry, armed property owner (Don Baldaramos) shows up, telling them they are trespassing and must move to public campsites 10 miles away. The visitors grudgingly consent, but then realize they’ve managed to get their vehicle stuck in a rut. In attempting to maneuver it out, Stan suffers a serious
.
The website popstar.one is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.