The Forest

So Yoga Hosers became, once I saw it, the worst 2016 release I'd seen so far (out of 36). That lasted for about a day or two, as now The Forest instantly slides in at #37 of 37. I had heard only bad things about this one, but sometimes a bad movie is still an interesting viewing experience, you know? (When they're 90 minutes long, I mean - not when they're Suicide Squad, which I still have no interest in seeing.) Average movies are obviously better than bad movies, but notoriety is almost more of a blessing than mediocrity. Here - name some of the worst movies you've ever seen. Very easy, right? Now name some movies you'd give, like, a C-minus. You're blanking, right? Because they're totally forgettable.

Another reason to watch a panned movie is purely to play the contrarian. Yeah, this might suck, but what if I can derive some enjoyment from it that eluded everyone else? What if I somehow "get" what it's going for where several others failed? What if, since all art is subjective, I end up totally loving this one? What if it just speaks to me? (Note - this only ever happens with comedies.) One man's trash, and so on, and so forth.

But I should have known better. Yoga Hosers was a sprawling mess from start to finish, but no one making it ever really thought it wouldn't be. It's tempting to ask, of any disaster, "How did this get made?" But in the case of Yoga Hosers that's a really easy question to answer. It got made because Kevin Smith has the money, the connections, and the industry experience to make just about anything he really wants to make, and he also stopped trying to make good movies, content instead to make feature-length in-jokes for his friends and his fans. Hell, he even gave his daughter a lead role in a legitimate feature film - why wouldn't Yoga Hosers have gotten made?

This lengthy set-up is here for me to say, as you may expect, that The Forest is a different animal altogether. It's a horror movie, presumably meant to be scary and at least half-decent and not, you know, a Yoga Hosers-style sprawling mess; The Forest, one would think, was not made as a joke, and did not come from marijuana and apathy. It seems like this is the type of movie that a lot of people invested a lot of time and money and effort in, and a movie that wasn't already giving a preemptive middle finger to an onslaught of one-star reviews. No, The Forest just kind of sucks. And not in a fun way like, say, The Happening. The Happening is a movie we can all laugh at, both when it came out and still to this day. It is bad, but hilariously so. The Forest, on the other hand, is the annoying kind of bad, which is to say that it ends up being bad even though it starts out seeming like something that might be, dare I say, half-decent. It's the kind of bad movie where, despite a few dumb jump scares and an absence of character motivation, I was still on board with it right up through the two thirds mark. "Okay, this isn't good or anything," I was thinking, "but it's not nearly as bad as all those reviews would have had me believe."

And then everything just went to shit. The little intrigue built up throughout the movie, which had a barebones but compelling enough hook and a legitimately unsettling atmosphere, just completely disappeared as the third act broke. "Oh. This? This is what we were building toward? Oh." The ending is somehow both predictable (tropes on tropes on tropes) and nonsensical (completely unrelated to the story being told up to that point). Don't bother! This isn't fun bad. I was wrong to assume it might be. It's just bad.