PLOT: Rico fears that werewolves lurk in the nearby forest, but the danger could all be in his head.
REVIEW: After being absent from the screen for over twenty years, Shelley Duvall made her return to acting with director Scott Goldberg’s horror film The Forest Hills – and the movie has gotten a good amount of attention for having Duvall in the cast. She was a Texas college student when she basically just fell into an acting career. She happened to meet director Robert Altman at a party while he was in Texas shooting his 1970 movie Brewster McCloud. Intrigued by her “upbeat presence and unique physical appearance,” the director and crew members talked Duvall into taking a role in the film. Suddenly she was an actress who started racking up credits: Nashville, Annie Hall, The Shining, Popeye, Time Bandits, Roxanne, The Portrait of a Lady, and fifty more, including hosting her own TV show, Faerie Tale Theatre. Then she stepped away from acting, as she felt that people in the industry had turned against her. In recent years she was in the news for her struggles with mental illness, including an appearance on the Dr. Phil show in 2016. So it’s nice to see that Duvall overcame the troubles she had been facing to make a return to the screen. As someone who grew up watching Popeye and Faerie Tale Theatre and tends to watch The Shining at least once a year, I find it heartwarming to know that Duvall had the chance to act one more time. Sadly, she passed away before The Forest Hills could make its way out into the world, but at least we have one more performance of hers to see.
That said, she does not play a pleasant character in her return to acting. In this film, she plays Mama, a character who’s introduced with a flashback to the day she decided to lock her young children Rico and Emily inside her car and attempted to gas them with the exhaust fumes. Now Mama has been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, and reaches out to her estranged son Rico (played as an adult by Chiko Mendez) so he can take care of her in her final days. While there are moments of Duvall scattered throughout the movie, most of her screen time is front-loaded, as the focus soon shifts away from the time Mama and Rico spend together. Rico has other things to deal with, as he’s extremely concerned that there are werewolves lurking in the nearby woods.
The Forest Hills has been marketed as a werewolf movie, and the creatures are a presence in the story. We get glimpses of the things stalking through the woods. But don’t go into this one expecting a straightforward creature feature. This may be the most bizarre head-trip werewolf movie ever made. The official synopsis for the story crafted by Goldberg is “a man is tormented by nightmarish visions after enduring head trauma while camping in the Catskill woods.” That’s the description to keep in mind, because the movie is all about Rico experiencing terrifying hallucinations, losing touch with reality, losing control of himself. The movie trips right along with him, showing us scattered fragments of messed-up moments, so we can never be sure what is actually happening and what is only going on in Rico’s mind. Which is the same problem Rico is having.
Are there werewolves? Is Rico a werewolf? Is he a serial killer? We can’t be sure – but one thing is for sure, and it’s the fact that Chiko Mendez put his all into this performance. We have Shelley Duvall up front and a supporting cast that includes appearances by Sleepaway Camp’s Felissa Rose, The Howling’s Dee Wallace, Halloween III: Season of the Witch’s Stacey Nelkin, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers’ Marianne Hagan, and Terminator 2’s Edward Furlong, but Mendez carries the majority of the film on his shoulders. He has a lot of very intense scenes to play, and he handles it all well, making Rico’s descent into madness completely convincing. His work in this film is quite impressive.
But even though I was impressed by Mendez, had fun spotting familiar faces in the supporting case, and loved seeing Duvall again, I can’t say I found The Forest Hills to be an ideal viewing experience. Trippy, scattered, “is this real or not?” movies just aren’t for me, so this isn’t the sort of movie I would turn to for entertainment. I’m glad I saw it once, but it’s not something I could watch multiple times. Goldberg did a good job of capturing and assembling the images that go with Rico’s mental health crisis, but I would have enjoyed it more if there were a more straightforward approach taken to the storytelling, with a more satisfactory ending. That’s just personal preference, and I’m sure there are plenty of horror fans out there who will be enthralled by the wild ride this movie takes the viewer on.
The Forest Hills is dedicated to the memory of George A. Romero, which was nice to see, since Romero is one of my cinematic heroes. His fellow genre filmmaker John Carpenter also gets a special thanks – and the score Goldberg composed with Mark Nadolski has strong Carpenter vibes at times, even bringing to mind the music Carpenter recently composed (alongside Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies) for Blumhouse’s Halloween sequel trilogy.
This movie is definitely worth checking out to see the actors at work, but if you were expecting a straightforward horror movie about werewolves lurking in the forest, set aside those expectations and prepare for a descent into madness.