Bosque de Muerte 1993 Review

Bosque De Muerte 1993

aka Forest of Death

Directed by: Carlos Ortigozo

Starring: Jorge Reynoso, Sergio Bustamante, Alejandra Espejo

Review by Luis Joaquín González

It’s a shame that there are so many genre films that were never subtitled for English speaking markets. I’m aware of Turkish, Russian, Finnish, Croatian, South and Central American pictures that are solid enough to have achieved success in other countries. Titles like Trampa Infernal and Noche Del Payaso stand out because they inject a level of creativity without taking liberties with the original template.

I have seen some English language reviews of Bosque online but never heard of a subtitled copy, so I wonder if all of those authors were bilingual or there is a DVD available that I haven’t yet come across? If so, I’d be keen to pick it up, because much like my copy of the aforementioned Noche Del Payaso, this VHS is very worn and the sound and visuals aren’t the best. I’ve had some time on my hands of late and so I watched Bosque with earphones and managed to get the gist of most of what was going on. It helped, obviously, that Spanish is my mother tongue along with Russian.

Three couples head to a secluded cabin in some dense forest to spend the weekend enjoying themselves. The site holds a few memories for one of the girls, Sylvia, because she grew up there before her mum drowned in the lake and her dad disappeared. Before long they are being stalked and slaughtered by a killer in a rain slicker, but who could be behind the vicious murders??

Interestingly enough, the early nineties in Latin America saw an almost identical trend in horror production that had taken place in the cinema of their western neighbours exactly a decade earlier. Whilst the slasher cycle was deceased in the US, the Mexicans and to a lesser extent, the Brazilians, were releasing some audacious pictures. This is one of the rarest of those entries, but it’s also amongst the best. It works by successfully mimicking the tone of an eighties slasher with perfection and accomplishing the tasty feat of being cheesy, mysterious, creepy and silly in the space of eighty-minutes. It’s also uniquely intriguing to see so many of the celebrated cliches rolled out so faithfully in el Español.

Director Carlos David Ortigoza leaves a lot of the runtime in the hands of his characters, but unlike the annoying geeks we see in most modern cycle inclusions, it’s hard to find something to dislike about this group. Our final girl Sylvia emits a positive nativity and innocent sexuality that makes you want her to prevail, whilst the macho Forest Ranger, ‘Jaguar’ (played by prolific actor Jorge Reyonoso) is a kick-ass anti-hero that you don’t know initially whether to love or hate. In an all action intro, he uses a rifle to shoot a wood poacher (?) that’s about to steal some trees and blows his leg clean off! Anyway, Jaguar and Sylvia had met 12 years earlier and shared a puppy love, which is conveyed by her discovering a heart that she engraved in a tree back then and Jaguar staring lovingly at a photo that he kept from when she was ten-years-old! (Not that you should find that disturbing in anyway at all).

Everyone is given hilariously OTT dialogue that ups the cheesiness and at times I found myself rewinding the tape to see if they’d really just said what I thought. A fine example is when one of the teens goes missing after swimming in a lake and Jaguar states with deadpan timing, “If he drowned, he drowned!” Also, in a manner that I’m not sure if was deliberate or not, it turns out the most of the deaths are caused by the inadvertently absent minded actions of victims being left alone by their friends. One hysterical chica, called Laura, literally pleads for Sylvia to stay with her in a room, but within two-minutes of our heroine searching for another of her (murdered) buddies, Laura gets an axe embedded in her forehead.

Another thing that I thought was intriguing, was how much of Bosque had been lifted from slasher classics of Mexico’s neighbours. The killer sports a rain slicker (Unhinged), looks on in ‘heavy breath POV’ through branches to survey his intended victims (Friday the 13th) and the kids pulling up in a van and being assisted by a Forest Ranger was reminiscent of The Prey. It’s not all freeloading though because Ortigoza includes some of his own gimmicks like the boogeyman throwing a decapitated head through the window to unsettle those he’s stalking. Also when his identity is revealed, thanks to some fine acting, he has a motive that builds momentary pathos.

It’s true that gore hounds and action buffs may get tired by the amount of time that it takes for the killer to get going (around sixty minutes), but personally I enjoyed spending a while with the cheesy antics of the youngsters and liked Bosque De Muerte. Quite why it hasn’t achieved greater success is beyond me, because it’s a really decent slasher that gets everything just about spot on.

Slasher Trappings:

Killer Guise:√√

Gore:√

Final Girl:√

RATING: