The Forest Hills is the cinematic equivalent of a concussion: disorienting, unpleasant, weirdly loud in moments, and afterward you’re not sure what happened, only that you probably shouldn’t have pushed through it.
On paper, this movie sounds like it could be something:
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A crowdfunded indie horror-thriller
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A troubled lead slowly losing his grip on reality
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Practical gore
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Shelley Duvall’s final role
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Edward Furlong, Dee Wallace, Felissa Rose — literal horror royalty in the supporting cast
In execution, it feels less like a film and more like you accidentally clicked on a disorganized YouTube fan project that somehow lasted 90 minutes and wouldn’t let you hit “skip.”
The Plot: Man, Wolf, Confusion
We follow Rico (Chiko Mendez), a thirtysomething guy who goes on a solo camping trip in the Catskills, suffers a head injury, and returns home with two things:
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Brain damage
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A script that doesn’t really know what to do with him
After this accident, Rico begins having “nightmarish visions,” which the movie helpfully visualizes using:
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shaky camerawork,
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random cuts,
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growling,
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and repeated shots of Rico looking sweaty and confused,
which, to be fair, is exactly what I looked like watching this.
He becomes convinced he’s turning into a werewolf. Or being stalked by one. Or maybe both. Or maybe neither. The movie never fully commits one way or the other, which could have been interesting if it weren’t handled like someone constantly flipping channels between “mental breakdown” and “SyFy Original Werewolf Movie” with no sense of rhythm.
We jump back and forth between:
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hallucinations,
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flashbacks,
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dreams,
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“reality,”
and after a while, it all blurs into a single question: Is this confusing on purpose, or did nobody want to pick a lane?
Rico: Man vs. Brain vs. Script
Chiko Mendez gives it his all as Rico. He yells, he cries, he snarls, he sweats through shirts like it’s a sport. The problem is that his performance exists in a vacuum, unsupported by coherent characterization.
Who is Rico really? The movie gives us fragments:
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He has unresolved family trauma
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He has anger issues
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He may or may not be killing people
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He may or may not be a werewolf
…but there’s no spine to his arc beyond “gets worse.” It’s just a gradual descent into madness with nothing to contrast it against. No real sense of who he was before, no meaningful relationships for us to latch onto — just a lot of screaming and shaky POV shots.
If The Forest Hills is trying to be a psychological character study, it forgot the “study” part and skipped straight to “lots of symptoms.”
Shelley Duvall: A Legend, Tragically Wasted
The most heartbreaking part of this whole thing is Shelley Duvall. Her return to acting after decades in retirement should have been a major event. Instead, the film uses her like a cameo in a fan film — one that leans into her legacy while giving her almost nothing worthy of that legacy.
She plays Mama, Rico’s estranged, terminally ill mother: verbally abusive, emotionally cold, and a huge factor in his breakdown. This could have been rich territory: a toxic parent whose presence haunts her son’s psyche as he spirals into self-destruction.
Instead, her scenes feel fragmented and underwritten. She appears, says some hurtful things, fades into the background, then reappears in visions that never quite land emotionally. The movie wants her to be this overpowering psychological presence, but it never puts in the work to make that dynamic feel lived-in. It’s relying entirely on our emotional connection to Shelley Duvall, not anything it builds between Mama and Rico.
It’s like hiring a legendary chef and then asking them to reheat frozen pizza.
Supporting Cast: Horror Icons in Search of a Movie
The film sprinkles in familiar horror faces like seasoning:
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Edward Furlong as Billy, Rico’s friend
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Dee Wallace as Angela
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Felissa Rose as Dr. Gonzalez
You’d think with this much genre pedigree, the supporting cast would elevate things. But their characters are so thinly drawn they barely qualify as people.
Billy and Rico’s friendship could have grounded the story — an anchor in Rico’s unraveling sanity. Instead, Billy mostly exists as a passive audience to Rico’s meltdown, occasionally reacting, rarely affecting anything.
The same is true for pretty much everyone else: they orbit Rico, get confused, frightened, or angry, and then vanish or become part of the body count. The film leans hard on practical gore — stabbings, asphyxiations, kills around campfires — but shock without emotional investment is just noise.
If you’re going to kill off a parade of side characters, it helps if we remember who they are for more than 30 seconds.
Structure: Non-Linear, Non-Clarity
The movie uses a non-linear narrative with flashbacks and hallucinations to reflect Rico’s fractured mental state. In theory, that’s a solid stylistic choice. In practice, it feels like someone shuffled the scenes and hoped the vibe would do the rest.
We jump between:
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Catskills campground moments
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disturbing dreams of transformation
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random gritty kills
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visits with Mama
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half-remembered trauma
But the timing and placement of these scenes don’t build momentum or deepen our understanding. They just… happen.
Good non-linear storytelling gradually brings pieces into focus until you see the full picture. The Forest Hills feels more like a puzzle where someone lost the box and half the edge pieces.
The Werewolf… Maybe?
One of the central questions is: Is Rico really turning into a werewolf, or is it all in his head?
That could have been compelling, especially as an exploration of trauma, mental illness, and self-loathing. Instead, the movie refuses to make that tension compelling or cohesive.
We get plenty of transformation visions and violent episodes, but the line between reality and hallucination is so inconsistently drawn that by the climax, the question doesn’t feel mysterious — it just feels arbitrary.
Yes, the practical effects are sometimes admirably gnarly. There’s blood, viscera, and old-school brutality. But the movie is so invested in Rico’s internal torment without actually saying anything about it that the gore starts to feel like a distraction rather than an expression of anything deeper.
It’s like watching someone insist “this is about the human condition” while smearing ketchup on the walls.
Theme: Trauma, But Make It Vague
Clearly, The Forest Hills wants to be about:
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mental illness
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childhood trauma
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parental abuse
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self-destruction
You can see the bones of something worthwhile here. Rico’s head injury and fractured relationship with his mother could have been used to explore how unprocessed pain metastasizes into violence and fantasy.
Instead, the movie keeps circling these ideas without engaging them. We never get a meaningful look at Rico’s past beyond some flashes of Mama being cruel. We never fully understand his relationships or the things he’s done. The “killing spree” becomes more of a montage than an unraveling.
By the time we’re supposed to care about Rico confronting his “inner demons,” the movie has given us so little access to those demons beyond surface-level misery that it doesn’t land. It wants pathos but hasn’t earned it.
Crowdfunded Chaos
There’s a certain charm to scrappy indie horror. Micro-budget films can be raw, fearless, and inventive in ways studio projects aren’t. You can feel the passion, the scrappiness, the “we made this with what we had and a lot of stubbornness.”
The Forest Hills definitely has passion behind it — you don’t wrangle this many horror icons into a project without someone being deeply committed. But passion without discipline just becomes chaos.
The film needed:
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a tighter script,
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a clearer narrative throughline,
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less repetition,
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and more focus on character over spectacle.
Instead, it sprawls: too many scenes, not enough progression, lots of yelling, very little meaning.
Final Verdict: Lost in the Woods
At its core, The Forest Hills feels like a well-intentioned but deeply messy tribute to old-school horror and Shelley Duvall, buried under poor structure, thin writing, and muddled themes.
It’s not utterly unwatchable — there are flashes of something interesting, a few unsettling images, and the occasional emotional beat that works in isolation. But as a whole, it’s clumsy, exhausting, and strangely hollow for a film so obsessed with inner torment.
If your greatest fear is:
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seeing a horror legend’s final role squandered,
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watching a story about trauma that confuses volume with depth,
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or getting stuck in a movie that feels like a fever dream you didn’t consent to,
then The Forest Hills will absolutely wreck you.
Not in the way it intended, but hey — at least it follows through on one promise: you will, indeed, experience nightmarish visions. They’ll just mostly be of the edit timeline.
