Black Forest

A group of tourists take a 'mid-summers eve tour' to the Black Forest of Germany to experience the night of the year when the line between our reality and the spirit one is at it's thinnest. Once there they are seemingly transported to a mischievous parallel fairy-tale world in this original Syfy film.

What started off pretty well (term applied loosely as in 'pretty well for a Syfy original) soon became awash with mediocrity. The set up was interesting enough and the plot was intriguing, I liked the fractured fairy tale approach but somehow the film lost its footing as well as my interest.

My Grade: C-

Now this is more like it. The Syfy original "Black Forest" actually shows that these productions can surprise and what we got was passable entertainment. Asinine, but enjoyable. What it makes up for in its low- budget, is in its concept creativity. Sure the execution is quite so-so and the CGI can be flat and laughable, but the atmospherics do work because of its well-etched production designs. Creating a fairytale world brought up many possibilities to explore and these disjointed stories involving wolves, fairies, dwarfs, witches and trolls do come alive. These aren't your friendly childhood stories, as some unlucky tourists find themselves getting lost in a magical forest in Germany and trying to stay alive by not becoming apart of the story. How to keep that from happening; sticking to the tradition of the fairy-tales. The script might be cheesy, but the story stays intriguing and creates some amusing, off-the-wall scenarios. I do think that the first half setting up the fantastical predicament is much stronger than the second half where things get senseless as the tourists are trying to figure a way out. The performances are agreeable despite their leaden characters with abeyant Ben Cross being the name grabber. Humour can be a little self- knowing, but it's not a distraction. One thing I noticed was the music theme that was constantly played resembled that of the 1987 "Predator". Better than expected SyFy original.

"Let's hope there's no wicked witch inside".

I admit I dislike most of SyFy's movies, and was not expecting much watching Black Forest. However, while it was not exactly a great movie, it was one of SyFy's better and more tolerable efforts.

SyFy does deserve kudos for thinking up such a good and original concept, a real departure from the typical creature, disaster and fantasy films dreamt up that a vast majority of the time are badly done. I enjoyed some scenes, my favourite being the seven cannibal dwarfs attired like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, though the scenes with the spiders from Little Miss Muppet, the Troll Under the Bridge and the Witch and her Gingerbread house also stood out. The acting while nothing extraordinary was a notch above other SyFy efforts(where it feels phoned in or shockingly bad such as recently Annihilation Earth), with nobody toe-curlingly bad really. Ben Cross looks as though he is really enjoying himself as villain Cazmar. I also loved the production design, especially that for the forest which is rich in colour.

However, some of the characters still annoyed me, by all means they are not as blatantly stereotypical as some of SyFy's other movies(in in disaster movies like Miami Magma or something like that) but there are at least three that struck me as too stupid to live sort of characters. Also, while the concept was great and there were some scenes that were memorable and surprisingly satisfying, the overall story at times has a very scatter-shot feel and there are some scenes that don't really make much sense. The dialogue is on the cheesy and lame side, and while the effects are miles above effects seen in Titanic II for example, I got the sense that a lot of work went into the production design but the lacking budget caused the effects to not have the quality they could've done.

Overall, one of SyFy's better efforts but still flawed. 5/10 Bethany Cox

You watch and get lost into this mess of fairy tales. Bad script, bad acting, poor visual effects, happy ending...

Is it adult? Not so much.

Syfy doesn't always put out the greatest movies, but this one is much better than some give it credit for. It was definitely better than some they've put out in the past five years. I am not giving away the story line, so if you want to know more about the film then watch Ben Cross's interview about it on the Syfy site.

His description about throwing a grenade into the "fairy tale" mix is quite accurate. It is his portrayal of the villain Cazmar that makes it worth watching alone. As usual, he makes any project he puts his name to shine. I love how he used the Irish accent for the character too as he delivered Cazmar's lines.

What I thought was totally disrespectful was the fact that IMDb totally left him off of this cast list and listed him for "The Human Factor" as Creighton--which he does not appear in. I know this for a fact. Shame on you for not fixing this before "Black Forest" was released...