The Forsaken (2001)
Starring Kerr Smith, Brendan Fehr, Isabella Miko, Jonathon Schaech.
Directed by J.S. Cardone.
Rated R.
Grade: D+
"Time to make your stand, punk."
The teen horror genre was already, thank God, on its way out, what with its last few installments not making much of a scream at the box-office (see Dracula 2000 and Valentine). The Forsaken, a mostly incompetent, incredibly derivative new vampire movie may finally drive a stake through its heart. There are still possibilities within the genre, but it has by and large worn itself out, with the latest ones becoming exactly what Scream originally parodied. This flick, in particular, seems to confirm that.
Sean (Kerr Smith) is an aspiring film editor who wants to make some extra cash, and get a free vacation at the same time, by delivering a new car to a lady in Florida. This, of course, involves an extended solitary road trip, complete with the cautionary words of Sean's employer: "If anything happens to the car, you better hope I don't find you." When his car breaks down (surprise!), he stops in a motel, where he begins to hear strange voices and see strange things.
He meets Nick (Brendan Fehr), a mighty strange guy who tells him that there are 3000 year old vampires roaming the streets, along with their assimilated counterparts. If you are bitten -- as he, and another girl they meet, and ulimately Sean himself were -- you can control the infection through a drug coctail, but after a few years it spins out of control on its own. The only way to kill these creatures is to kill the original few, which Nick has dedicated the last two years of his life to doing.
Writer-director J.S. Cardone, of dubious B-movie fame, edits his film to within an inch of its life. There are usually two reasons why directors use such rapid-fire cutting: because they want to obscure some deficiency in the special effects or because they think it looks "cool" (and sometimes, as in the case of the just-released Moulin Rouge, it does). Either way, I had no idea what was going on in many of the climactic scenes, and I was too irritated to care.
There's some vague allegory with the drug coctails and the vampirism being a symbol for AIDS, but it is abandoned in favor of a mind-numbingly stupid climax with a lot of incoherent chases and fights in an innocent lady's house (which, aside from being badly edited, is so dark that you can't see anything anyway). And the movie is so desperate to hold the attention of teenage boys -- God forbid they bail after about twenty minutes of boredom -- its opening sequence involves a completely gratuitous shower scene showing a naked teenage girl bathing herself in blood.
Kerr Smith takes a break from his role on Dawson's Creek to stand around looking incredulous (as someone who's never seen the show: does he do that there too?) and Jonathon Schaech must have been really desperate for work. Only Brendan Fehr actually has any acting to do, and he looks like he just wants to get this over with and move on to his next project.
Yes, I know, some movies are there just to entertain us. Some movies don't need to be analyzed, just watched. This is not one of those movies because it didn't entertain me. It bored me, and when I am bored I get cranky.