Skull Forest (2012)

Stars: Lisa Neeld( Playboy), Sara Brooks (WWE) and Pamela Sutch ( B-movie Scream Icon).In a Len Kabasinski film.So, There is bidding for an opportunity to hunt down HUMANS, Evidently this is a regular event….Sheesh ! Was intrigued that some of the 'Bad Guy Hunters ' were also women hunting other women,What does that tell us…Kind of deep thoughts for a B-Movie …Right ? The female leads are pretty impressive,Yes,PRETTY ,I mean we get to see a lot of them physically displayed and yet they can hang with the boys in the violence department.The stunts,gore scenes and sheer terror developed in the script was great.

In the intro some guy in the forest is suddenly shot. Then we meet four female friends among them a cop and a busy business lady who go on a hiking trip in the woods. Next we meet a group of rich arrogant people at some fancy induction ceremony were new members are introduced. We hear something about their professional backgrounds and their extracurricular activities which involve hunting.The trip is going fine for the ladies until some French-speaking guy with a gun shows up. The lady cop neutralizes him and handcuffs him to a tree. Suddenly a shot is fired from somewhere and the guy is hit in the head. Of course there's no cell phone reception anywhere. The girls separate into two groups of two. They don't know what is going until more bullets start flying in their direction and they start running into hunters. Hunters from the rich peoples club who are hunting them! Two of the girls run into a cop who takes them to a cabin. Later two hunters end up there as well and there's a surprise. The cop lady does her best to save herself and her friend as bullets and arrows start flying and they even have to face mines. Later we get another surprise as one of the girls starts taking matters into her own hands and goes after the hunters. The hunters, which include women, let competition take the best of them and they start beating each other up. The question is who will survive at the end.Skull Forrest is competently made very low budget horror movie. Everybody seems to be doing the best with little resources. Acting varies across the board from good to terrible. The movie looks fairly good and the events thankfully takes place almost entirely during the day. The director is resourceful and makes things look better than they are. Aside from the problems resulting of necessity there are problems of choice which are odd and a bit annoying. A lot, too much, is filmed with the camera at a 45 degree angle, so the image and the actors are diagonal on your screen. Movies often overdo the closeup of faces, and this one is no exception, but it goes beyond that by giving us closeups of nearly everything. The director also does his best to avoid giving us dialog. When a revelation is to be made, he cuts to something else leaving us guessing as to what was said or wasn't said. Ordinarily low budget movies stay away from action or effects by giving us characters and dialog. Skull Forest insists on action and effects and avoids story for some reason. There is some fairly well done gore and some nudity as well which does make this movie stand out among low budget flicks. In general for a movie with little to no budget Skull Forest represents a strong effort by the cast and crew.

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.

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.