Forget Me Not

If Forget Me Not was an essay, it would be one with some pretty good body paragraphs and a rather disappointing conclusion and flimsy beginning. Shame that it had so much potential but unfortunately Forget Me Not just doesn't really know how to start or end with power.

Forget Me Not is all about Sandy (Carly Schroeder from Mean Creek) and her friends enjoying their time on graduation weekend. They should be having a blast, but after an odd encounter with an unidentified girl while playing the game "Forget Me Not" (which pretty much just looks like Hide and Seek in a graveyard), things begin to go wrong. It's up to Sandy to find out why this is happening and how to stop it before her and all of her friends are completely forgotten.

My favorite thing about this movie is easily what happens after each person is killed; the memory of them is totally erased. It's a pretty inventive idea that actually hasn't been done to death which is a rarity in basic slashers such as this one. Not only is it creepy based merely on the idea of totally losing any type of memory of your friend after they're gone, but it also adds an extra layer of mystery about Sandy when her friends start disappearing. It makes you wonder if everything is at is seems or if there's something going on with her that's being saved for the grand conclusion.

For a low budget horror movie, the effects were pretty decent as well. I loved how the ghosts would show up on the scene and the most recently murdered friend would join them. So by the end of the movie, the main characters are being chased by their entire clan....who they pretty much have no memories of. Weird. The death scenes aren't out of this world amazing, but at least it's not like most other horror movies where everyone just gets stabbed or ripped apart; everyone dies in completely different ways, and I'd be lying if I said that the death scenes involving an open grave and a wood chipper didn't bring a smile to my face.

Now for the bad....the beginning scenes are absolutely painful to endure. I've never met anyone in my life that speaks as ridiculously asinine as the characters in this movie do. It's so ridiculously contrived you would swear that some parts of this movie were written by someone with the attitude of a 60 year-old on how the youngsters communicate. 4 minutes in, and I couldn't wait for the death scenes to start happening just to get the characters to stop talking. It's quite odd how the performances get stronger as the circumstances get less and less realistic. You would think acting like a partying teenager would be easier than acting like a teenager getting chased around by a recluse ghost who makes your entire memory fade away.

As for the ending, I was pretty disappointed as well. Towards the climax, several ideas popped into my head about what I thought/was hoping the big twist would be (because you know there's going to be one...come on). Sadly enough, none of these ideas happened on screen. The final scenes feel so choppy, rushed, forced, and nonsensical (even by this movie's logic...shit doesn't add up), you would almost swear that this was the ending to a completely different horror movie and not the one that started building promise after the initial painful and stiff opening scenes. Just do yourself a favor, turn off the movie around the point the remaining characters head to the convent/hospital and we can forget the rest of it ever happened. :)

2/4