Review: Black Forest


Ben Cross plays Cazmar, who runs a tourist bus deal where he takes dopey tourists to Stonehenge-like sites (though this appears to be set somewhere else in Europe, perhaps Germany) he claims are magical. On his latest run he stops to do some kind of magic chant thing for the tourists’ amusement, and hey presto Cazmar vanishes and the tour group are left to fend for themselves in forest surrounds that seem a whole helluva lot different than when they first ventured there. They have found themselves in a fantastical alternate reality where fairy tale characters come to life, and aren’t friendly at all. Tinsel Corey appears as a mystery woman who pops up in the alternate reality and claims to know how to survive, whilst Sapphire Elia plays an au pair to a married couple with a young child.

 

Every now and then, the SyFy channel turns out a decent genre movie that surprises me. This 2012 Patrick Dinhut fantasy flick is not one of those films. In fact, it’s pretty crummy and rather cheap. The basic concept might’ve made for a fun episode of TV’s “Lost Girl”, but stretched to feature length, and as written by Frank H. Woodward, there’s just not enough material for a film. It also seems to mix up the fairytales, with a Goldilocks set-up turning into an attack by what appear to be blood-thirsty dwarves. Very weird scene.

 

The characters are boring as hell, and the accents are all over the place. Ben Cross’ wavering Irish accent (or is he a pirate?) is particularly bad, but when you find out he has an Indian daughter with an American accent, it’s even more comical. Cross (playing the very Irish-named Kazma, by the way) can act but he’s lost the will to give a crap at this point in his career.

 

Conceptually, this is what I was expecting the TV show “Grimm” to be like, but it wasn’t, and that show lost me before the end of the pilot episode. This film isn’t any better, though the basic idea was certainly workable and I do like that SyFy have tried something a little left of centre for a change. It just hasn’t been thought out enough, and is cheap and stupid, cornball stuff. To be honest, aside from the seriously hot Sapphire Elia, the only thing that kept me awake here was the fine music score.

 

Not the worst SyFy film, but not among their modest entertainments, either. Nothing to see here, move along...

 

Rating: D+

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