I have FearNet on demand. This is both a blessing and a curse. The blessings are I can catch up on some horror films I haven't seen yet or watch some of my old time favorites that I don't own on DVD. Unfortunately the curse comes when I decide to randomly pick a film just based on the title. Its like playing Russian Roulette with your remote control. But I was still sick yesterday and feelin' frisky so I decided to pick a movie at random and see what would happen.
The curse struck again.
I picked out this dandy of a film called The Forsaken, or as like like to call it Vampire Hunter Douche. Every male in this film is a douche and every woman in this movie is a blathering idiot, a psycho hose beast, or both. The movie follows a young man (douche #1) who decides to road trip across country to get to his sister's wedding. In the process he meets a vampire hunter (douche #2) who gets him wrapped up in some strange vampire hunting antics involving a blond catatonic and the most obnoxious vampire leader ever (douche #3). There's also some sort of subplot about Douche #1 driving a loaner car across country to some rich woman. And that's....pretty much it.
The movie feels like it was trying to be a John Carpenter's Vampires for the "bro" set. It's wants to be a rough and tumble macho movie. But what it lacks are charismatic characters (and actors) and the hard core brutality that Vampires has. This turns it into a movie about two douche bags chasing another douche bag and slapping a dumb blond around for no apparent reason. Am I using the word douche too much? Probably. But I can't think of any other term that could describe the characters in this movie better other than possibly fucktard. You just don't care about them. You care more about the state of their loner car than you do them. Though most fight sequences I thought "Oh! That bullet will damage the paint! Oooh! The bumper fell off! Oh No!" while one of our heroes was shot, bitten, or beaten to a pulp.
Also, their vampire mythology is all over the damn place. I'm a women who likes it when mythologies are played with. It always presents a fresh take on an old concept weather its zombies, vampires, or werewolves. But I do believe you should attempt to make the new mythology make sense and be consistent. At the beginning of the movie, its established that vampirism is passed on through some form of infection that you get when bitten. You can also take a form of drug that will delay the turning into a vampire. Okay, I can get into that. You have to kill the vampire that turned you, before you turn to go back to being human. Okay, I can get that too though it sounds weird when it comes to fighting an infection. Vampires were founded by a bunch of french knights that sold their soul to the devil, then divided up and started biting people....okay wait...wasn't it supposed to be a medical condition not a mystical one? Right about this time, most of the medical info from the start of the movie was forgotten and dropped. I suppose both medical and mystical can go together if you take the effort to WRITE about it. But it just seemed dropped after the french knight explanation. No mention of any other magical properties of the drugs either. It just didn't mesh. Come on writers, either make and effort to combine the two or PICK ONE!
Now usually when a movie has gaping plot holes, at least we can rely on the idea of the vampires being cool right?....Right? Yeah, not so much. These were the most annoying group of blodsuckers EVER. Even Anne Rice's vampires couldn't hold a candle to these obnoxious, annoying, wannabe bad boys. Here's what they do. They Eat. They Fuck. THAT'S IT. They don't even do either very interestingly. Most of the feeding frenzy scenes are cut away or filmed so erratically that you can't really see much happening. And the sex scenes are the same.Also, our head vampire chews the scenery so much you really can't tell if he's overacting or if he has some form of brain damage. And his girlfriend bugged me. I know they were trying to make her a femme fatal. I know she was trying to be sexy. But her sexy consisted of looking vacant, cocking her hips, and having the vague air of syphilis about her. Oh, and for those keeping count, you do not see her boobs.
Okay, I can go on and on about how insanely dumb this movie is but I should stop now. One good thing is it didn't make me enraged like Jeepers Creepers did. Probably because I had no expectations going into this film. Also, I do believe this would be a hilarious film to watch while completely drunk, though it lacks the complete ridiculousness of Nick Cage's Wickerman.
Overall? Unless you want a mediocre drunk film, or have a douche fetish. Skip this one.
