Synopsis
Daddy's Gone A Hunting
A cannibal hermit living in the woods preys on campers and hikers for his food supply.
A cannibal hermit living in the woods preys on campers and hikers for his food supply.
Terror in the Forest, El bosque del terror, 食人森林
I adore this bizarre little dtv slasher, I mean that vhs art alone is enough to love it, but I also love that it took the very popular at the time “slasher in the woods” subgenre and did something different and wacky. It’s about two couple who decide to do a battle of the sexes in the forest only to run into a crazed cannibal ghost and his family?!! I love it.
There’s a scene at the beginning where the two couples are sitting around talking and being generally dumb and white as hell and it’s pretty hysterical. There’s also more than one soft pop rock song written just for this movie so that alone should tell you whether or not you’ll dig this.
"DADDY'S GONE A HUNTING!"
Now that's a tagline! And yes he certainly has gone hunting! Just like my brain hunted for any morsel of logic in this strange film. On the outside the Forest seems like your typical backwoods slasher. Well it just turns out that there's a magical beast of nonsensical madness lurking in this unassuming little film!
The plot is a real doozy. John catches his wife having an affair and kills both her and her lover. He grabs his kids and flees into the forest. His children end up getting sick and kill themselves and now they are ghost children! What? And now John has turned into a murderous cannibal hermit! Ghost wife shows up too! The…
A man decides the best way of dealing with his wife having a bunch of affairs is to kill her, move his kids into a cave in the woods and eat people. Unsuspecting backpackers troop off to their demise, despite being forewarned by that classic harbinger of doom, the world weary park ranger.
No-one meets their demise quickly either. This movie takes its sweeeeet time, with everything. For a film about a forest it takes a fucking age to get there, squeezing in such thrill-packed scenes as the boys' Mazda pickup running low on water along the way. The editing ensures night and day are relative concepts.
My favourite scene featured a man defending himself from the girlfriend-muncher with a…
That weird 70s/ early 80s ‘humor’ about how women's lib brainwashed women who are actually still stupid (Midge on that 70s show being a good example) into thinking they can also do stuff like go on camping trips because they read about it only it’s still too hard! (Implying that women can't do stuff or even learn to do stuff) I guess they need men after all ... Plus those narrative songs in a horror movie are either hilarious or make you wish you never had ears.
Procrastinating another fun phone conversation with my nurse practitioner’s receptionist about my annual exam. Yesterday, she was like ‘oh they clean stuff really well!’ when I asked about their procedures like that's literally…
I'd been meaning to watch this for years since it's covered in Stephen Thrower's Nightmare USA, but finally got around to watching it after reading that the director passed away today.
I've lived a fairly charmed life and have gotten to know, over many breakfast meet-ups and Q&As, the actor who plays the killer in this: Mr. Gary Kent. Unlike his character in the movie, he's a vegetarian.
Gary was great friends with writer/director Don Jones, and has been updating on social media as Don has been battling illness for awhile. Before Don it was Gary's friend Richard Rush he was mourning. Before Richard Rush it was Bud Cardos. I'm sure I've forgotten a few, but my point is, this generation of exploitation/genre captains and footsoldiers are dying out. I hope they all know that their work will be revisited more often and for longer than many more "respectable" movies from the same era.
I think my absolute favourite part of this movie is a man catches his wife in bed with the refrigerator repairman, and the repairman actually gets out of bed and goes back to fixing the fridge....
Anyway, cannibal hillbilly, ghost wife and kids, two couples camping in the middle of no where, you know, the usual story....oh wait, no. This is kind of insane, but also starts to drag once the ghost kids start to show up too much. The theme song is kinda awesome though and a fun fist fight between one of the dudes and the cannibal hillbilly...you know he's a hillbilly because he wears a truckers' cap. Right?
Watch this for the best dialogue in the history of film:
"DADDY'S COMING!!!"
"What does that mean?!"
"I don't know!!!"
A dark forest inhabited by a reclusive cannibal and his ghost children sounds like a home run but somehow this movie manages to bore it up.
A pair of couples, both rocketing toward divorce, decide to take separate camping trips to the Forest. The wives arrive first, with the husbands coming a few hours later. Setup complete: we've got a suburbanite foursome, in the Forest, ready to be carved up by something lurking in the darkness.
Then some ghost kids show up out of nowhere and we're introduced to the cuckold cannibal, head of this spectral family. The slow-witted husbands, having virtually no survival instincts to speak of, crash with our murderous maneater for the night, before returning to the Forest to eventually be hunted... later on.
This is such a peculiar film. It meanders around a lot, probably due to how few characters we have…
The poster looks like a slasher and it starts like a slasher, but this is really a movie about ghost kids and their depressed father who went to the woods to be a cannibal because his wife was cheating on him. The classic bait'n switch!
I didn't have a blast watching this, but after having some time to reflect, it's definitely atypical. It's brief. It's strange. It's minimalistic.
There's 8 characters total, and 3 of them are dead before the first frame.
I would've sworn that the mustached man was JK Simmons of Whiplash/Oz fame, but it's not. :-/
Not a great movie, but something worth experiencing.
“What’s the matter with you, man? Are you crazy?”
“Crazy? Of course I am! We’re all crazy! Winter’s coming. I gotta have food, that’s all.”
An oddball entry in the campers getting hunted category. You have the least scary looking cannibal madman, sporting a trucker hat, blue jeans and a hoodie. You have a pair of ghost children that keep popping up. There’s never any tension or suspense. The gore is minimal. But it has one of the coolest movie posters ever. It got me back in the 80’s when I first rented it. It captures everything you wish this movie was. The film itself is forgettable.