Forget Me Not

Before I say what I have to say, I should point out that I'm an exceedingly patient viewer. I watch roughly 1,000 movies a year, writing and speaking about most of them, enduring even the most amateur and low budget of films in the spirit of being professional and fair. I don't walk out of films and do my best to appreciate if a piece of work is successful in its aims, even if those aims preach grotesque heteronormative tedium like Four Christmases and Couple's Retreat. I shut off Forget Me Not around the 50-minute mark when I realized there was still another hour to go. I did turn it back on to fast-forward through the inevitable series of kills, just to see if I was wrong in my assumptions of how each scene would play out, but alas, there were no surprises, which wouldn't have changed my opinion of the film anyways. Ostensibly, the film is about scholarship siblings Sandy (Carly Schroeder) and Eli Channing (Cody Linley) and a group of their archetypal friends being killed off one-by-one after a game of hide-and-seek in a cemetery. There's a shitty "mystery" behind it all, which we figure out in the opening scene, but mostly it's a bunch of insipid teens spouting one-dimensional filler dialogue and making jokes about fucking each other's moms when not fornicating and being murdered in an illogical manner. Very rarely does a sequence serve any purpose beyond leading us to another of many boring kills, which are noteworthy for dreadful shot composition and exceedingly lethargic direction that generate slightly less tension than a panel on America's Next Top Model. Quite simply, this movie has no reason to exist; it's boring, insulting and can't even entertain on a superficial visceral level. It's almost appalling that there are people out there that read this script and thought to finance it considering how many actual talented writers and filmmakers are unable to get work. I blame a crass industry that prioritizes networking over talent. There's an alternate ending included with the DVD, but really, who cares?