Forest Warrior

1996 film by Aaron Norris

Forest Warrior is a 1996 American adventure film starring Chuck Norris and directed by Norris's brother Aaron Norris. The film was released on direct to video in the United States on November 5, 1996. The film is perhaps best known since late 2011 as the source of a scene in which Chuck (a ubiquitous Internet meme himself) stops a chainsaw by grabbing it with his bare hand. The scene has been reposted numerous times on YouTube with views totaling several million, as well as made into an animated GIF for use on Internet forums and message boards. Another memorable scene features a logger who air guitars with his chainsaw.

The film opens with a campfire story being told by Clovis Madison (Roscoe Lee Browne) to a group of children, about frontiersman Jebediah McKenna (Chuck Norris) who was killed a century ago in the Tanglewood forest by armed men after refusing to sell his land to a lumber company. McKenna was magically brought back to life and given the power to transform into a bear, wolf, or eagle. Inspired by this tale, the children dub their group the Lords of the Tanglewood, complete with the following pledge: "We ask you to leave it pure as found; for we are to it forever bound." During the present day, the Tanglewood forest is targeted for harvesting by a logging conglomerate directed by villainous lumber magnate Travis Thorne (Terry Kiser). Most of the small town is against their deforestation, including the kids, who regularly camp out in a treehouse in the woods. During one of their trips, a group of loggers bully the kids, only to get beaten up by McKenna, who also happens to be a master of Native American martial arts. The loggers report this to Thorne, who orders the treehouse destroyed. While the kids are gone, the loggers place a bomb in the treehouse, unaware that the Tanglewood Lords' leader and sole female member Austene Slaighter (Megan Paul) is still there. McKenna beats up the loggers again, then uses the forest's magic to resurrect Austene just like he had been. Austene is reunited with her father Arlen (Michael Beck), once the town's deputy sheriff but now its token drunk. Meanwhile, Thorne is finally granted approval by the town to bring in his lumber crew. The Lords of the Tanglewood rally in response to this; they distract the loggers with numerous boobytraps, impeding Thorne's efforts to chop down the forest. They also play rock music on a ghetto blaster, which causes the loggers to dance around idiotically. Finally, McKenna appears before Thorne and intimidates him by turning into a bear; the terrified villain calls off the deforestation and confesses all of his wrongdoing to the authorities. With their forest saved, the townspeople rebuild the kids' treehouse while Austene sees McKenna's spirit reunited with that of his Native American wife.

The film was shot in Oregon in 56 days from January 14 until March 10, 1996.

The film received mixed reviews from critics. Doug Walker, aka the Nostalgia Critic, has called the picture "a must see for anybody who refuses to believe there are worse roles an actor can get stuck with than that of a corpse (referring to Terry Kiser's deceased title character in Weekend at Bernie's)." According to Richard Scheib on Wayback Machine, the picture is " A desperate and ungainly attempt by Chuck Norris to reinvent himself as anything other than a one dimensional macho man (in this case, as a liberal eco defender), with woeful results. Norris possesses all the acting ability of a tree trunk; he simply doesn't have the range for something like this, despite going a step beyond The Lorax who merely spoke for the trees, while Norris clobbers and terrorizes for them outright. This film takes its whole quasi Sierra Club/Green consciousness thing far too seriously. The reverence for the land solemnity becomes absurd: the bad guys are blatant caricatures, being constantly associated with ecologically unfriendly montages (smoke belching trucks and factories, trees being mulched, etcetera); there are also lots of cute animals, with Rags the bear cub giving a better performance than any of the human leads The third act descends into Home Alone style slapstick, with lots of childish sadism against the shallow and buffoonish heavies, all in the name of environmentalism Although his name sells (or at least is supposed to sell) the movie, Norris stays off screen for most of the running time; the film mostly concerns itself with the juvenile "Lords of Tanglewood" playing in their treehouse and gleefully torturing the inept, brain dead villains."