Random Movie: The Forsaken (2001)

Unlike some other teen-based horror movies that came out in the late 90s and early 00s, The Forsaken never really made a big splash when it first came out and seems to have faded into obscurity, relegated to random showings on late night cable even with the popularity of other vampire properties soaring. Like many of its cinematic brethren from that era, Forsaken really offers nothing new or differentiating in cinema or story. It is just a cleanly produced, slick offering catered towards the slightly younger crowd who probably would not notice its flaws.

Kerr Smith stars as Sean, low-level assistant for a film studio in Hollywood who has been hired to drive a mint car to Miami where he will attend his sister’s wedding. On the way, he meets up with Nick, played by Brenden Fehr who seems a bit too knowledgable in helping a young girl who acts very erratic after being bitten by a vampire. Nick shares that he too was bitten by a vampire over a year ago but has been able to contain the spread of the vampiric virus through a specific blend of medications. Nick is on a mission to track down and kill the main vampire to stop the spread of the infection through their bodies.

Viewing this movie is similar to watching a sporting event that you do not give a rat’s ass about. While the film is fairly proficient on a technical level and not a craptastic train wreck, not one thing about it is memorable from the story to the cast to the locale. I felt a grand sense of deja vu while watching this thinking back to John Carpenter’s Vampires. Vampires itself is not a very good movie but no one can deny that Carpenter at least has some strong talents even when the movie he is making blows chunks. I am convinced that writer/director J.S. Cardone was trying to infuse half of Carpenter’s ideas with other, better, vampire movies like Lost Boys with nary an original though to ride along.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have seen the entire series of Dawson’s Creek which features Kerr Smith in the bulk of those episodes. While he is good there, as well as other more recent fair like the My Bloody Valentine remake, Smith is just utterly bland here as with the rest of the cast. Other than the contrived plot to get him on a cross-country journey, we know very little about his character Sean, his traveling companion Nick, the mostly mute random girl they pick up, any of the vampires … you can probably see where this is going. I will say some backstory to the bloodsuckers is given but it is largely inconsequential to the rest of the film and I missed it the first time around and I did not feel like rewinding the DVR.

Some of the choices of the story were just baffling. Nick explaining that he has been able to keep the infection at bay for over a year without any side effects or other damage really puts a damper on any sort of urgency that would otherwise accompany. Also, the fact that the vampires are just as likely to run you down in a car, slit your throat, or shoot you with a gun almost negates any need for them being vampires at all as opposed to a posse of crazed, desert-lurking weirdos. As such, the carnage is limited to gallons in a minimal amounts of scenes and there are more portions of car chases and action movie shootouts than gory kills or feeding.

I can just skim through the list of some of the movies we have reviewed and give you a bunch of worse movies but at least there may be a good performance, scary scene, or flat-out cheese to laugh at. Just like another Cardone script, Prom Night, The Forsaken is not so much a bad film as it is totally forgettable.