Tuesday 1 March 2016

Film Review: The Forest

"I Don't Know If This Forest Made You A Psycho Or You Were Always This Crazy..."


Of all the clichéd, hack-eyed prattle that has been released over the course of the past two years, The Forest, starring Game of Thrones regular Natalie Dormer in the leading role, can be surely regarded as the worst. You know those popular videos on YouTube where that dude completely dissects a movie and points out everything wrong with it from start to finish? Well he would have a field trip with The Forest, a film so unoriginal, so dull, so unashamedly dire that even last years' woeful The Gallows looks like A Tale of Two Sisters in comparison. In terms of plot, and I am using the term incredibly loosely, Natalie Dormer portrays two twins, one of whom ventures into the infamous Aokigahara Forest in the Northwest base of Mount Fuji in Japan, an area famous for its' tendency for suicides, resulting in the blonde half of the twins, Sara, attempting to fly half way across the world in order to locate her. Cue racist stereotypes, token hot guy and awful jump scares.


In fear of rambling on into next week, The Forest believes it is a film of unquestionable spiritual originality, a film that wants us to believe that no one ever has gotten around to seeing The Evil Dead, The Grudge, The Descent, The Shining and other films occupying in a completely different league, films that although have a wide range of flaws, are important to horror fans across the globe in their success at creeping the pants off of everyone who has ever seen them. Enter The Forest, a film which wholeheartedly rips riffs from each of these different horror classics yet still ceases to end up scary. Although you are fundamentally inclined to jump at something that goes boo at the end of a completely silent sequence in film, the jump scares in The Forest are just cheap and lazy, scenes that make no sense whatsoever and add to the shoddy nature of Natalie Dormer's first venture into a leading role in cinema. The Forest isn't just tosh, it's annoying tosh, tosh that acts as a metaphor for American horror's venture to be as good as their Japanese counterparts by invading the country and then sticking two fingers up at everyone in a sadistic Trump-like fashion. Watch Ringu. Watch The Grudge (THE ORIGINAL). Stay away from The Forest. Utter tripe. 

Overall Score: 2/10



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