It’s a rare thing to get to catch a werewolf film in its natural habitat (i.e. a movie theater), so I jumped at the chance to see this at its one local screening earlier this month. The poster trumpeted the participation of Shelley Duvall, Edward Furlong, and Dee Wallace, but The Forest Hills proved unworthy of their talents, and a pitiful swan song for Duvall, who died in July and receives an “In Loving Memory of” dedication in the closing credits. The brainchild of multi-hyphenate Scott Goldberg, the film starts off reasonably well, with Duvall’s character receiving the news that she has stage four lung cancer with a world-weary resignation — and without pausing her near-constant smoking. The trouble comes when the call goes out to her estranged son Rico (Chiko Mendez), who is the actual protagonist and is not the sort of character whose exploits one wants to follow for 70-ish minutes.
Before we know it, Duvall has exited the picture and Mendez has taken center stage, going on the war path against the werewolf he’s convinced is lurking in the woods around the farmhouse where he has set up shop, and randomly shooting friends and acquaintances with the guns he’s gotten from a fellow werewolf hunter. In fact, Rico has bagged two of them (friends, not werewolves) before the film gets around to properly introducing his best friend Billy, the kind of role that illustrates just how far Furlong’s star has fallen since he made his screen debut 33 years ago in Terminator 2).
For someone who gets top billing in the film, with his name before the title, Furlong doesn’t actually stick around very long, and a late-arriving flashback shows that Billy isn’t as much of a friend as he makes himself out to be. (Wallace, meanwhile, has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her cameo as Rico’s boss, who unceremoniously fires him from his dishwasher job.) Also in the mix is Rico’s sister, who is concerned that he’s off the meds, and a social worker who tries to get him back on them to no avail, at which point it becomes abundantly clear that Rico’s main problem is that he’s mentally ill, possibly stemming from a head trauma he sustained at a vaguely defined point in the past.
Randomly edited to the point of incoherence, with an overabundance of dream sequences, slow-motion shots, and scenes of Mendez bellowing at the top of his lungs in varying states of undress, The Forest Hills eventually starts introducing new characters and plot twists at such a rapid clip, it’s as if Goodman decided every single idea he had needed to make it into the final film, regardless of whether it fit or not. If this had been told in a straightforward fashion, it could have been a compelling portrait of a mentally unstable man driven to commit terrible deeds. It could have even been played as a black comedy, leaning into some of the more risible moments that inspired peals of laughter at my screening. As it is, it’s an incredibly shitty no-budget indie that is to be avoided at all costs. True, it occasionally throws in a cool-looking shot of a werewolf, but there are better films with cooler-looking shots of werewolves out there.
