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.

During the present day, the Tanglewood forest is targeted for harvesting by a logging conglomerate directed by villainous lumber magnate Travis Thorne (Terry Kiser).

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).

"[2] 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.

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.