Reed Alexander's Horror Review of 'The Forrest' (2016)

This movie is just plain dumb, with some of the worst fucking acting I've ever seen. I mean, 'Tommy Wiseau School of Acting' bad. Mind you, not as bad as The Bay (2012), more like on par with They (2002). If you're making movies with a budget, there's no excuse to have bad acting.

Now, the movie itself is visually stunning, but the complements end there. Even the practical FX looked like something out of the original Evil Dead (1981). Not to mention, the plot is DUMB. I mean trying to wipe your ass with single ply toilet paper, one sheet at a time, dumb. A woman goes looking for her twin in the suicide forest of Japan with a shady stranger because NO ONE would help her.

Seriously? How fucking primitive do they think the Japanese are? Yes, it is true, they are a very superstitious peoples, but they do have forest rangers and all the same search and rescue technology as the rest of the fucking world. They have to drag bodies out of the damn place all the fucking time. OF COURSE if some dumb foreigner gets lost in the suicide forests, people go in looking for them. It happens ALL THE FUCKING TIME!

I mean, fuck sake, they literally have a scene where they find a body and KNOW to mark the site on their map so they can tell the rangers latter. There's a god damn scene where the fucking rangers GO IN after these idiots when they inevitably go missing. How does one cognitively write a script where the second part of the movie completely negates the driving force of the first half of the fucking movie?!?!

That's not even the worst part. My fucking god, the tone of how the Japanese are portrayed in this movie is awful. It's like how George Takei used to talk about getting typecast in Hollywood as constantly having to play a Japanese man "acting Japanese." They pin the entire culture as intentionally weird for the sake of freaking out foreigners.

I mean, at the heart of this movie there seems to be an 'attempt' to have a story about dumb white foreigners not respecting Japanese culture and their superstition. But HOLY crap what a shamefully failed attempt at that narrative. This isn't the only time Zada has fucked up a similar narrative. House October Built (2014), was basically about a film crew trying to exploit carnies.

But ONE MORE fucking complaint before I get to the spoilers. JESUS H FUCKING TAP-DANCING CHRIST, this movie was chalk full of shameless unearned jump-scares. I haven't seen so damn many shameless unearned jump-scares since White Noise (2005). Actually, this movie was worse.

I wanna recommend this movie for Riffers, because there is a LOT of material to riff. However, it's disrespectful enough where I'm pretty much under the opinion no one should watch it.

Seriously, fuck this movie...

~

SPOILERS!!!

So, of course they let these dumb fuckers CAMP for the night in the suicide forest. Mind you, right now I think Aokigahara is officially off limits to tourist, because of assholes constantly getting lost, and there is NO WAY they'd let you camp there over night. However, we couldn't have the movie unless we dragged the plot kicking and screaming, so OF COURSE they fucking camp over night.

And then they leave the camp, after being explicitly instructed not to, with ZERO fucking reason to leave the camp, because the whole fucking point was to wait at the camp for the twin sister to return to the place she was fucking camping!

AND eventually this dumb bitch starts running like a maniac through the forest, because this movie couldn't drag the plot any harder unless it also leaned on "weaker sex syndrome."

AND WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE POINT OF THE ENDING!!! Okay, so... the forest was holding onto her twin sister ALIVE because?... why? It wanted to trade the twin for the main character? What the fuck for? I mean, I get it, she had a bond with her sister that let her know she was still alive, but why the fuck would the Yurie of Aokigahara care enough to keep her alive to get at the main character? What's the fucking motivation here? Why not just kill them both?

Yeah, fuck this movie...