Review: Forget Me Not

Carly Schroeder and her pals are hanging out in the cemetery like they used to do as kids, but it seems someone wants to spoil their fun, bumping them all off one by one. A series of flashbacks suggest something or someone in their past has reappeared in the present. Christopher Atkins briefly appears as the father of Schroeder and her brother Cody Lindley.

 

Directed by Tyler Oliver and written by the director and Jamieson Stern, this 2009 teen horror pic contains one very strange element in an otherwise entirely nondescript and frankly boring film. It is apparently from 2009, but the film at times could pass for several different eras and even countries in horror filmmaking. There’s elements of J-horror in plot, but also 80s slasher elements at other times (“Prom Night” especially). Visually it seems to want to evoke 70s horror, yet looks like a low-budgeter from 1994 and occasionally throws in a J-horror ghostie as well as that low-angle ‘running while the camera is glued to the girl’s tight arse’ stuff seen in the remake of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (Some of the lighting and production design evokes that film too, and represent the only interesting element of the film). And yet, the characters are clearly modern, as are the performances. Worst of all, however, the film’s attitude towards sex and violence is straight out of the immediate post-“Scream” era. And boy am I not happy about that. Who the hell has sex in a bra? No one outside of the people in this film and actresses in the teen horror flicks of the mid-to-late 90s, that’s who. This is the only film I’ve seen in ages where you get post-sex without the foreplay or the sex itself being shown on screen. There’s just way too many hot chicks in this film to be having so many of them not nuding-up. They either take their tops off away from the camera (Why would you do that unless the camera is part of the actual scene? It breaks the fourth wall in addition to offending my perverted sensibilities), or just wearing underwear in situations where no one with such fine bodies would bother covering up. For instance, the sheriff’s slutty daughter bones a convenience store clerk and is barely wearing anything to begin with, but when she drops her top...we see nothing. I’m not just being a perve, this film is a cop-out. I’ve seen more risqué material on Nickelodeon.

 

The jump scares didn’t even make me jump, and I always jump at those! There’s a bit of gore here and there, but little more than you’d find in the horror films of the late 90s or early 00s. I mean, killing someone via a car accident? In a horror film? Unless that film is “Christine”, it’s simply not acceptable. Meanwhile, of all the film’s to use the phrase ‘You’re not making any sense’, this is the dumbest because the person apparently not making any sense actually makes perfect sense. What the hell? Also, the central mystery is stupid, because there is no way that these particular characters would ever forget this particular person. No way. Having said that, we are barely introduced to any of the characters, so we don’t care either. Flashbacks in particular come far too late in filling us in on who is doing this and why. Speaking of the characters, they’re awful. Aside from the slutty sheriff’s daughter, they are all interchangeable. The only way to distinguish between them is by who they are paired up with. The slutty sheriff’s daughter is just plain weird. In addition to not being slutty enough to do nudity, she keeps rubbing her sex life in her dad’s face to the point where it’s almost hinting incest. She seems to be flirting with her own father, and I’m almost certain that’s neither the attention in the screenplay nor the actress in question. It’s just totally unbelievable.

 

Special mention must go to the d-bag who, after his disgruntled ex-girlfriend throws the bracelet he gave her into the water, yells out ‘Fine. It’s yours. Swim for it!’. Um...dude, she threw it. She doesn’t want it. Or you.

 

Sorry, but this tame, toothless, and tired film offers nothing new, exciting, or pleasurable at all. There are too many more distinguished horror films out there to waste your time on this one. I’ve forgotten it already.

 

Rating: D+