In the Forest is a bizarrely no budget film with weird edits, terrible dialog, and actors who might be decent if they weren’t saddled with such terrible dialog. I also am not sure what genre it falls into. It has the storyline of a hillbilly horror flick but it kind of just plays like a regular old thriller. Not because there aren’t any hints of horror but because the movie doesn’t seem to know how to handle horror.

The film is about a family who go camping and find out they are on private property when the owner (and his rifle) order them off. They are happy to oblige but their RV gets stuck in the mud. So mom goes for help, breaks into a house, gets involved with a mysterious boy locked in a bedroom, and then people just run around the woods for awhile making bad life choices.

I’m not sure if the people who wrote this script really thought things through. These characters bring it all on themselves… if they just respected property rights, there wouldn’t be a movie. But also the backwoods redneck family are kind of the reasonable ones here (and their shack looks like an average suburban house).

But there is that stickler of a slightly unhinged teenager locked in a bedroom. what’s wrong with him? Who knows. The movie doesn’t. To the film’s credit, there is a mystery about the boy’s sister that had me guessing. It was the only thing in the movie that made me wonder anything at all.

This movie is a long, turgid bore. Everything is weirdly paced and amateurish. Also, look at that cover art. That’s 100% more atmospheric than 99% of shots in this glaring, over-lit, flat looking film. I don’t think the cinematographer… well… I was going to make a funny joke about what the cinematographer knows or doesn’t know but I think the more apt joke is that the cinematographer is just a figment of the director’s imagination.

This is a very bad movie. But it’s a bad movie in the kind of way that makes you demand a better class of trash. This is just so flat and dull that you want a little misplaced lunacy, extremely bored overpaid actors, or schlocky special effects to liven things up. But this movie doesn’t have the competence to be an interesting bad. It’s just armature hour at the bad film-o-rama.

Score: 56