REVIEW: Forget Me Not (2009)

Oh, boy. If I could forget I saw this shit, you bet I would do it faster than you can say ‘turn the TV off.’ Forget Me Not is a movie with the incredibly original plot of a ghost getting revenge on people who wronged her in the past. Oh, well, it would have been original if I Know What You Did Last Summer didn’t exist maybe, as well as the thousands of rip-offs that are spewed out every year by talentless hacks who couldn’t come up with a good idea if it was flat out handed to them on a platter. Well, I think that sums up Forget Me Not really well actually! But I’m going to review the whole thing anyway, because I hate myself.

Director: Tyler Oliver

Starring: Wait, who was in this movie again?! I CAN'T REMEMBER! The ghosts must have erased my brain!!!

IMDb

I mean, OK, the plot has the one original element of having the ghost erase the dead victims from peoples’ memories instead of just killing them off – that’s kind of a unique concept. But the movie doesn’t do anything with it, and the whole thing is incredibly tasteless and boorish to levels that would make even most 80s slashers blush. Let’s get this over with.

We start off with some montages of people having sex and cheating on one another. We know nothing else about them, so being invested is out the window, and on top of that, they act like such wretched douchebags that we’re also pretty much disinclined to care about them at all for the rest of this whole movie! It would be one thing if this was a campy, lighthearted flick that used its characters as punchlines, like some of the old Friday the 13s or something, but Forget Me Not takes itself so seriously and the tone is so unpleasant that I can’t get behind it at all.

"Quick, I promise I'm not kicking you out of your own house to have sex with my girlfriend! I'm helping you escape this movie! Run, my child, run!"

Basically, I hope these characters are raped and killed by a Chupacabra, upon whence their graves would be desecrated by an army of drunk hillbillies wearing Michael Myers masks. Unfortunately none of them have particularly grisly death scenes…damn you movie, damn you!

So after some throwaway scenes at a party that I think Project X would like to have a word with, the group all go to a graveyard to play “the Game,” an old favorite pastime of theirs in which they recite some kind of really morbid, macabre chant that sounds like something you’d hear in a bad Goosebumps episode. These high school kids, who are obsessed with partying, drinking and drugs, are going to go out in a graveyard at night and recite this incredibly elaborate chant, and NONE OF THEM find it weird in the least?

Uh huh. Right. Unless they're going to bury each other alive in that graveyard I don't care.

I’m sorry, that’s the first big hole with this. No normal kids would ever play this game. I mean it’s basically just like tag. Why all the pointless theatrics? It’s pretty bad when My Soul to Take is outdoing your movie in plot coherence. At least that one just let it all hang out that it was a big stupid joke. This movie actually thinks it’s something to be taken seriously.

So this one girl who nobody knows comes and asks to play with them, and literally everything she says gets interpreted by the guys with innuendos mixed in. “Oh, can I play?” “Sure you can, baby.” Wink wink. Nudge nudge. What’s next, is she going to ask how the weather is and then end up talking about what Kama Sutra positions she likes because of it?

So they play tag and everything goes accordingly until the mysterious girl who no one knows and no one bothered to ask about, jumps off a cliff. The main character Sandy, i.e. the only one who is not a total piece of trash, starts to have strange flashbacks to when she was a kid, when she played the weird graveyard tag game with another girl who had asthma. Despite this, she still doesn’t put together that it may have something to do with what’s going on. Because she is a goddamn moron.

Yay, good parenting IS letting your kids play in a graveyard unsupervised! Won't leave them scarred at all am I right?

Meanwhile, the next morning, one of the idiots wakes up in a car by the lake with his girlfriend. They get out and he says he wants to break up with her, so she throws some little necklace thing into the water which is never explained, and he starts to make her feel bad…for him breaking up with her? Whatever. He leaves her there in her underwear by the side of the lake. That’s a total dick move there! It’s almost like these characters are complete wastes of air…

After that, they all decide to go on a trip to the beach. Look at this one chick; she’s practically a porn star already:

Ha ha, sorry girl, Girls Gone Wild was filming at the OTHER crappy suburban set piece. You're stuck in a degrading B-horror movie about ghosts.

She does this in front of a bunch of people already in relationships, plus her father – why? What’s the attraction? It’s not like anyone there really wants her that much. Even the only single kid in the group, the little brother of Sandy, already likes one of the other girls! But it’s OK. Her boyfriend is off at a factory getting his arm chopped off by one of the machines. Is that an asinine and convenient way to kill off a character when you have no other ideas? Yes. Yes it is.

Then we see more of the movie’s brilliant special effects as one of the assholes who was late to the party runs into a ghost that looks like something that even the American remake of One Missed Call would have rejected:

Go back to whatever R.L. Stine book you came from, demon! I banish thee!

And really, this plot doesn’t work that well. Want an example? How about the scene where the whole gang is running around in the woods looking for their friend whose screams are leading them to her? When she dies, they forget about her entire existence just like every time someone dies in this movie. So WHY WERE THEY IN THE WOODS THEN? What kind of excuse did their brains make up to rationalize randomly being in the middle of the woods for no reason? Are you seriously telling me these kids didn’t have some weird blackout in their mind, some gap in their train of thought that they want to look into? Yeah, because I guess doing things with your plot is overrated. More generic slasher cliché, please!

They end up at some motel where one of the girls has sex with Eli, Sandy’s brother, which I guess would make sense, provided that she’s into Justin Bieber:

Now I can tag Justin Bieber in this review's tags - bet you never thought you'd see the day, huh?

After that she gets killed and then the brother was never there at all, apparently only having come with them for that girl. Sandy and her boyfriend go in search of this convent where apparently the girl who is making all of this happen lives. They go by and pretty much accomplish nothing except getting Mr. Boyfriend killed off by more of those stupid-ass ghosts that look like something you’d see on a Hallmark Halloween card, and so he never existed, and the world wasn’t better or worse off for it since, well, he was a pretty bland character…

That's not scary, it's a bored study hall doodle of a Troma flick.

Eli comes to get her and then they go to the hospital to find coma-girl, who, through some handy flashbacks, they discover that they accidentally put into a coma by scaring her to death with ludicrous Insane Clown Posse makeup:

ICP legions RISE!!

At the hospital, the sheriff, her parents and some other random people have apparently staged an intervention for her. She gets tied to a table and sedated just for saying some crazy things and crying, and it’s up to Eli to save the day! Only before he can even turn around, he gets ambushed by the stupidest scene this movie has yet to show us, which, if you’ve been keeping up, is a pretty goddamned big accomplishment. Feast your eyes on THIS:

I'm sorry, I didn't realize I'd put in the new Cradle of Filth video...

Wow. The amazing incompetence on every single level of what this was going for, is just astounding. The incredible asininity and ridiculousness of this scene would get five full stars if I was rating for incompetence. I mean, if they were going for stupid, by god they succeeded! Full marks on that front, movie! But unfortunately, given the tone of the rest of this, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that it was supposed to be scary and ominous…sigh…so I have to keep on saying it sucks I guess.

Then the movie ends with Sandy confronting coma girl in her bed and just unplugging the machine. At least she doesn’t go full stop and choke the bitch like that girl did in Red Mist…but then the movie ends with coma girl magically waking up and jump scaring Sandy so bad that SHE goes into a coma while the original coma girl wakes up and is totally fine. Now, wait a minute. How did coma girl have all these powers to begin with? It’s never explained! How was she erasing people from existence? They don’t even TRY to make that make any sense!

I guess we’re just supposed to NOT pay attention to those gaping, crater-sized plot holes because the movie is so scary and cool! But even that fails, because this movie is about as cool as disco music and bell-bottom pants. This is just heinous – HEINOUS! I can’t think of one good thing about this one. If I could erase this movie from existence by doing this review and killing it metaphorically, I would do so in a heartbeat. In fact, I’m going to try that right now!

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It’s a long process. Working on it though….

These images do not belong to me, and the copyright belongs to...wait, huh? What am I doing here?