Forest Primeval (2008 Video)
6/10
Generally fun enough for a cheesy low-budget creature feature
22 October 2022
Troubled by strange dreams and visions, a woman heads out into the woods to find the source of the strange visions where she encounters a pair of hunters looking for treasure that has instead unleashed a monstrous creature on the community and must find a way to stop its blood-soaked rampage.

This one proved to be quite an enjoyable enough effort. Among the better features here is the interesting and intriguing premise that provides the film with a great setup. The idea featuring the survivor retelling the events of an earlier expedition that ended in tragedy offers up nothing new but still provides the kind of baseline for the introduction of the creatures' backstory being involved in the folklore of the area. As well, her suffering from the visions caused by the unforeseen accident propelling her to tie everything together to murders by a strange beast gives this a solid series of plotlines to work with. This all provides the film with some fun setups involving the creature attacking. Relying on a slew of slasher-style sequences showing the creatures' point-of-view coming through the wilderness on the victim unsuspectingly, there are some rather enjoyable attacks here including the opening ambush on the hikers, the ambush on the wandering hiker in the woods, and the chase through the woods taking the various stragglers out that it stumbles across. Coming together with a rather fun finale featuring the true purpose of the knife, the use of a fun puppet monster, and a generally cheesy feeling, there's quite a lot to like about the film. There aren't too many issues here but it does have some flaws. The main issue here is the overall obvious low-budget here that comes through in pretty easy-to-spot manners. That comes about mainly in the effects work here, from the rather silly gore scenes that look like paint being applied to the woods, the flimsy oversized hand prop for the creature that's quite goofy, and the appearance of the zombie which looks like a Halloween mask. Given the overall look and production value featured here, that becomes even more obvious, and when mixed with the unexplained nature of the zombies' purpose all serve to bring this one down.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.
0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

Recently Viewed