A little while ago I made a joke while writing about I am Omega about how "The Asylum Presents" were the only words you needed to read to strike fear into the hearts of even the most seasoned movie watchers. But now, I've found even scarier words... "Syfy Presents." I wish there was some kind of warning (maybe a little logo on the art on Netflix?) but I figured "what the hell" and sat through it. And it ended up being quite the chore.
I think Black Forest is more or less trying to ride the coattails of Once Upon a Time, the CBS TV show that re-imagines Fairy Tale characters in the real world. Here, some people from the real-world are transported to the Black Forest - another realm/plane of existence where all Fairy Tale characters are real. Basically, a group of seven tourists are roped in by a fast talking tour guide to visit a "magical world" - they figure it's all in fun, but boy, are they ever wrong.
Our tour group consists of a family of three (asshole businessman, his younger wife, and their baby daughter), their nanny, two nerds doing research on mystical places/vortexes (Stonehenge and the like), and a doctor going on the tour by himself. Mostly because we need a hero, I guess. The tour guide is a creepy/goofy guy named Cazmar, who takes them to some random circle of stones out in a field. After day turns to night (for bad filmmaking reasons, not magical reasons) they join hands, there is some crazy lights and Cazmar and the baby disappear. The six of them are panicky and realize they are no longer out in a field - they are in some strange forest! The first order of business is to try and find the missing baby... so they wander around until they hear her cry. The crying (or maybe a goat?) leads them to some sort of inn, where they meet the innkeeper, a young woman who seems to know more about this mysterious forest than she lets on. Oh yeah, there are some scary wolf creatures and other things out in the woods that want to kill them. So they are supposedly safe in the inn.
Even though they aren't... I guess there are rooms in the inn that each represent a certain fairy tale. So you can go into one room and get killed by a troll living under the bridge, or another room where you can get killed by the seven dwarves. The rules are not well laid out. There is this though:
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| I forget, what is the fairy tale where they play cricket on an electric dartboard again? |
Just lazy. At least unplug the damn thing. Ye Olde Inn is supposedly all old fashioned with just books and creepy pictures and no signs of modern technology... and they let this in the shot. Boo!
So they try to get out. Sorry if my recapping isn't up to snuff. I watched this less than 48 hours ago and am having trouble remembering much of it at all. It's instantly forgettable.
As you would expect it you've ever seen a SyFy film, the special effects are really terrible (all CGI, of course) and the action scenes are incoherent. The acting isn't bad by any means, but no one really has anything interesting to do. Even though they seem to try and cram as many accents in this thing as possible - the actor playing our hero doctor is from Tunisia, our innkeeper is Canadian, several folks from the UK, and who can even tell what the mother is going for. It's a crappy movie with world-wide appeal! The highlight of the film by far is Ben Cross as Cazmar - he seems to know that just chewing scenery as much as possible is the best way to make this thing watchable. So it is for the 10-15 minutes that he's on screen.
Overall, there isn't anything to it. It's not fun at all, even in its badness. There are some pretty colors in it, I guess.
I would definitely not recommend this film.
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