This is a movie review... I will not outright spoil things, but if you want to really experience a movie fresh and clean, there is information below that will dirty you up! So beware of mild semi-spoilers.
Synopsis: A bunch of utterly forgettable, yet attractive and sporty, teens (AKA actors in their twenties) celebrate their graduation by getting drunk and having a good old-fashioned game of tag in the cemetery. A mysterious extraneous teen joins them, then jumps off a cliff and vanishes. One by one, the other teens become even more forgettable as they are murdered by ghosts and the other characters forget they existed. Attempted J-Horror ensues.
Scariness Type: No scariness. There is some gore, and I'm pretty sure most of the movie is
supposed to be jump scares, but they failed utterly at it. It's very odd. They'll quickly cut to a scary ghost face, make a loud noise, but I'm just sitting there going, "Oh, okay, there's a ghost."
Rating: 2/5 Forget-Me-Nots. The flower, not the movie title.
Good Stuff: The idea of the killed people vanishing from memory was pretty fun. The entire world actually changed so that they had never existed, which was a bit odd. After the initial extremely-cliche beginning, I remained interested to see how that would play out as the group was whittled down, so it kept me watching. I also liked the source of the ghosts, to not spoil anything. There was an episode of Buffy that was quite similar.
Bad Stuff: But that's about it. It's a bunch of kids wandering off alone to get killed, one after another. There's really nothing else to it. Towards the end the heroine starts to piece things together and try to solve the problem, but the ending was very disappointing. There was nothing exciting about the kids getting stalked and killed, it was more like "Here goes this one. Now it's this one." No tension of "will they get away?" Well, one scene had some of that, but only because the laws of physics stopped working (someone yelling for help thirty feet away from you in a very sparse forest and an entire group can't find them?). Speaking of laws, this movie didn't really have any logical rules to the ghost stuff. I saw what they were doing, with the nursery rhyme and all, but it didn't actually tie together into anything that made sense, and in the end it came to nothing. There was no sense of "oh, this is how this works, so if they just did X, they would succeed". Nope, just random death.
Also, what an absolutely stupid rhyme. If it were more on-the-nose, it would be a pair of glasses.
Classic Rules Of Film: How many times do I have to tell you people? Don't go off alone when everybody is getting killed! Actually, this movie subverts that, by virtue of the fact that only the heroine even knows people are getting killed. Everybody else forgets they ever existed, so they never think they're in danger. Clever!
My Take: This is a total 80's throwback, to when jock teens would gather and get murdered every time they did something immoral. The heroine is of course the one girl who doesn't do anything wrong, and always looks disapproving at their drugs and drinking. They're really channeling that 80's style. On the other hand, they tried to also capture the style of J-Horror. The ghosts in this movie are ripped straight from any Japanese horror movie - people in monochromatic makeup, with distended faces, that jitter and vibrate, moving towards you slowly, unless they're far away in which case they skitter rapidly. All they're missing is long black hair. Yet somehow, unlike every Japanese horror film, they're utterly unscary. I'm not even sure how, they just have no scariness. I never once jumped even a little bit, I never cringed in anticipation that something was going to happen that I wouldn't want to watch. Whatever it is they did wrong, it was something subtle in the edit timing and sound effects, because all the factors were right, they just came out bad. It's an interesting lesson in horror design. I do know one thing they were missing: they never lingered for long enough on ghostly things before they jumped at you. They didn't give you that time to build up anticipation of when they would attack.
Artistic Nonsense: What a nice anti-bullying message. Don't pick on people if you don't want them to turn into a vengeful ghost and vanish you from existence. Very clear and straightforward. Be nice! I was a little disturbed by the ending of the movie which seems to have forgotten that this was the point.
Our next movie is the epic smash hit of unimaginable chilling terror:
Mega Python Vs. Gatoroid! It's got both Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, and my sister recommended it to me! This can't go badly. I've seen
Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus (I think that's the title?), and that was excellent, so I have high hopes. Man, it's almost Halloween. Soon no more movies!
