The Forest Hills

RIP Shelley Duvall. It's too bad that the great actress's final film appearance is in Scott Goldberg's inept, nearly unwatchable independent horror-thriller. Still, I admire her for coming out of her 20-year retirement to do a cameo and then pressing to enlarge her role. Since this 82-minute, patience-testing mental illness/werewolf movie has no discernable structure, characters, rhyme, or reason, why not add more Shelley Duvall? Her cameo could have been as minor as that of Dee Wallace (The Howling, Cujo, Critters, E.T.), who literally looks like she could have shot her two scenes in this movie in under 25 minutes.

The film is billed as a "Edward Furlong in," but that's both ridiculous marketing—the star of Terminator 2, Pet Cemetery 2, Little Odessa, and Pecker plays a fairly minor "best friend" role—and an insult to star Chiko Mendez, who is most certainly the actor who is "in" this movie. Mendez stars as Rico, a man convinced that a werewolf is haunting him, or that he's a werewolf, or maybe both. Rico knows he has a history of mental illness, has suffered a traumatic brain injury, and is a murderer. However, he can't figure out how to quiet the nightmarish visions he experiences that lead him to kill dozens of people. The film consists mainly of his flashbacks, dreams, and murders, with a few scenes of other characters trying to figure out what to do with him. All the performances are one note, with Mendez's being an especially shrill and tediously resonating note. The photography is generic, the editing is atrocious, and the score is silly. What a complex waste of everyone's time.