The Forsaken (2001)

Best movie of this year hands down!

To me, this movie is perfection.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I have always had an obsessed with vampires. This movie I have loved ever since I have been little. If you enjoy vampire movies with a lot of blood and mean vampires(Not ones who sparkle) Then this is for you.It's about Nick and Sean who meet a mysterious blonde girl. They get sucked into the world of vampires in the middle of the desert. I think the acting is wonderful. Johnathon does an amazing job as Kit (He pulls off being a vampire, looking sexy and scary and also having that "it" factor to lead the group of vampires). I wouldn't look past this movie at all. It does follow the line of The Lost Boys, John Carpenter's Vampires and Near Dark. This vampires are vicious and vengeful which makes for a good vampire flick.

Best write a review before this movie escapes my memory and dissolves with the passing time. Sean (Kerr Smith) works in Hollywood as film editor (mainly preparing trailers) and as such isn't exactly overflowing with cash. Hence when he lacks funds to attend his sister's wedding in Florida he decides to take up an offer by a repo office to drive a classic Mercedes to Miami. Main two rules - no hitchhikers and no reckless driving. In movie logic - those are the two rules that will definitely be broken during the course of the movie. Even more so that along the way he picks up a bum vampire killer called Nick (Brendan Fehr) and a catatonic chick Megan (Izabella Miko). Which only puts him high on the feeding list of a gang of bloodthirsty vampires led by Kit (Johnathon Schaech)...The scriptwriter tried to input some new life into the whole vampire genre by introducing a new myth concerning their creation (connected with the crusades) as well as giving it a great backdrop for prospective sequels (with three more 'original' vampires waiting to be vanquished. Trouble is that the movie itself is so cliché ridden that the freshness just isn't there. Actingwise all the people in this movie do a decent job and have a cool enough feel to them that it makes the flick enjoyable. But the dialogue and direction of "The Forsaken" is very traditional horror filmmaking (with no real atmosphere behind it) and that in itself makes it a competently done, but forgettable experience. Additionally they are no real action or horror scenes which really stand out and in general you feel more like you are being served a pilot of a television series than a movie itself.The biggest fault I can find in this movie is the character of Megan, who gets involved in the plot for no real purpose, sits around catatonic for most of the movie and doesn't even have a romance with the hero. After all this she just walks away in the penultimate scene never to be heard of again. Totally pointless character played by a passable Izabella Miko (not too pretty and does nothing with her character to make her memorable - given she was supposed to lie around motionless for the majority of this movie). Much more eye-catching was the vampire Cym (Phina Oruche) who must have one of the most sensual lips I have ever seen in cinema...

Prolific director JS Cardone(Alien Hunter;Shadowzone;Outside Ozona)brings us this profane Midwestern vampire tale with attitude starring Kerr Smith as, Sean, a young editor of trailers for a low-budget movie company who takes a car delivery job from Cali to Florida, but his journey is disrupted when he unfortunately picks up a hitchhiker, Nick(Brendan Fehr)who just so happens to hunt bloodsuckers. The head vampire, Kit(Johnathon Schaech)he's looking for is of a specific number called "The Forsaken", a clan who accepted an offering from a demon and hence were cursed to only walk the earth at night. Sean and Nick come across a young woman, Megan(Izabella Miko)who has been bitten by Kit and is slowly going through the process of "turning" as the vampire who left the virus in her continues to live. While trying to cool her body(..Nick, who has been bitten and must also find a member of "The Forsaken" before he himself becomes one of the undead, notifies Sean that Megan's blood is "burning" so her body temperature must be cooled)Megan bites Sean's hand leaving Kit's virus in him. So now Kit's death is of major importance because not only does Megan suffer as long as he remains alive, but Sean also is threatened to become a vampire. Nick, appropriately enough, encountered a doctor who had been bitten and was given knowledge of certain drugs which can slow down the process of turning into a vampire. But, the drugs can only last so long so finding Kit and exterminating the source of the blood disease is of utmost importance. But, Kit as his own brood, two female bloodsuckers and a dim-witted subservient day-driver(Simon Rex), who travel with him so Sean and Nick, with Megan used as bait, will need to find holy ground for a legitimate stand-off. Ina Hamm(Carrie Snodgress, rather wasted)just so happens to live in the middle of nowhere with her house stands on top of a Spanish graveyard..perhaps this is indeed the refuge they need as a base to fight Kit.The film doesn't pretend to be anything else but a horror tale of innocents plunged into a battle against a predator who holds the keys to their salvation. It's too bad this was made in 2001 because Cardone's trashy little vampire film would make perfect drive-in fodder. Schaech's presence as a charismatic and sexy male vampire really adds a great deal to this particular film as does Phina Oruche as his black sex slave Cym who attacks bloody throats with ferocity. Rex will earn chuckles as a rather simple-minded human watcher often saying "Okeydokey" when ordered by his boss to commit murderous deeds to those who threaten them. Particularly memorable is the murder of a cop who pulls Rex's Pen over for speeding, insists on seeing what was in their truck, receiving a shot-gun blast to the chest, and subsequently is burned alive on top of the hood of his police car. The attractive cast is headlined by Smith as the young hot-shot stud with a big bright future in the movie industry whose life is changed by a fateful drive into a most dangerous situation, and Izabella Miko as the doe-eyed innocent whose family was obliterated by the evil clan and bitten by Kit who must settle "unfinished business" when one of his vampire chicks didn't follow his command of killing her. Fehr was a bit too young, I felt, for the part of vampire hunter who knows an awful lot about the history of this breed of bloodsuckers..I often wondered just how he received all this information. But, I guess Cardone was perhaps motivated by the studio to fill his cast with beautiful people so Fehr was selected. The opening of Cardone's film sure sets the tone of this flick, a zombie-like Miko showering the blood from her gorgeous naked body. She's later undressed by Nick attempting to find the vampire bite as Megan lies comatose from the virus raging inside her. Miko is either asleep or mute for a good portion of the film but Cardone utilizes her vulnerability, youth, and beauty quite well..very photogenic. There's a very nifty image of Miko's Megan with her hands pressed up against the back window of Sean's car as they drive away from a scene which nearly killed them. This film isn't all that original and seems to evoke the spirit of "Near Dark", but I thought Cardone uses the setting at night really well and there's a nasty streak this film has that worked for me. There are some unnecessary images propelled into the action from past scenarios which distracted me a bit, but certain gory bits are effective like how vampire bodies explode when in contact with sunlight too long, and a shot-gun blast to the face which does some serious damage. "The Forsaken" would probably make an appropriate double feature with John Carpenter's "Vampires."

Vampires have certainly come a long way over the course of cinematic history, indeed textual history as a whole. What started off as a secluded and rich count living in a massive castle in Eastern Europe has gradually become less and less as the years have worn on. Eventually, vampires would be of Hispanic decent as seen in From Dusk Till Dawn and of African American decent as seen in the Blade films, but there are probably earlier still examples of these two types. In The Forsaken, the vampires are of the teenage variety – a far cry to what vampires as a whole began as which makes the idea of these different, post-modern 'types' of vampires look a little silly and like a gimmick. There cannot be much surprise then, when The Forsaken comes across as something equally so.But there has to be some honesty about this comment and that is that I was enjoying The Forsaken up until a certain point. In the long run, the film is nothing special and when essence of familiarity and formula begin to creep into a film that few will even have heard of, let alone seen; you know it's struggling. Although the film falls into that genre of horror, you feel it does less so for the fact that it is genuinely creepy and more so for the fact that mere vampires play an important role in its plot line. The narrative drive for the film sees one of very few vampire leaders left amongst them hiding out in dustbowl America – it is this lead vampire, who has a pretty nasty back-story from over in Europe, that Nick (Fehr) is charged with hunting down and killing for sake of all mankind. Innocent bystander Sean (Smith), who is on his way to his sister's wedding, gets caught up in this extremely small scale war and will suffer as a consequence.I know the cliché is that you shouldn't pick up hitchhikers and films like The Forsaken really hammer home that idea. Yes, you don't know if they're crazy but it could be worse, they could be the harbinger of a story revolving around the apocalypse. If Wolf Creek told us not to hitchhike because you never know who's picking you up and The Hitcher told us not to pick them up in the first place, then The Forsaken has an equal message of morality emphasising what not to do if someone wants a ride – notice Sean's weakness was the offering of money by the third party; is this a further hidden message about the sin of greed? But this adventure will not be so easy for vampire hunter Nick, who reveals himself at a nicely timed point in the film amongst some nasty scenes involving a girl that is 'turning'. Nick may be way too young for my liking to be such the veteran vampire hunter he says he is we'll all have to go along with it. It turns out these nasty caricatures of teenagers who have been going around teasing Sean and Nick over uncharged car batteries and causing carnage at stoner beer picnics are indeed all part of a gang that fronts this lead vampire that needs to be gotten rid of.But while this idea for a story feels old and outdated, it is remarkable how ordinary the execution for it here actually feels. The idea of a post-apocalyptic world is a scary one and the scenes in which mere mortals are on screen are sparse and over quickly, one or two of which meet their grizzly demise in double quick fashion – the best being the state trooper, a figure of authority and power dispatched relatively easily by the antagonistic vampires. This helps build whatever atmosphere the film needs to make us mere mortals look smaller and less powerful; a race that would not win the war if that's what it came to. But The Forsaken is a film whose best scares are incidences like a particularly large spider creeping towards a young and defenceless girl in a compromising situation as well as the lead villain using a snake to bite his arm in order to achieve some sort of 'high'. The film is all very low key and should not be viewed as an exercise in scares.Along with this, the evil-doers in The Forsaken are either established as individuals of a French (European to the wider extent of things) decent or are black females as seen in the case of Cym (Oruche). It's this biting and somewhat childish way of pointing the finger at Europe as the source for the evil-doing and casting a black, British girl for the role of the chief villain's blood hungry, seductive girlfriend. The Forsaken is a film that starts out promising; gradually gets sillier and then ends with an explosion before establishing a disappointing new order in which we discover nothing really has been achieved. But at least the film moves on the character of the vampire as a whole: they can attain a mere rush over a poisonous snake bite to the arm but when it comes to sunlight, they're still screwed. With this in mind, the sequel might as well have vampires whom can withstand a machine gun clip to the torso but have a character throw a piece of garlic at them, and they run scared.