Screamin’ With Teens
Main Cast: Carly Schroeder, Cody Linley, Brie Gabrielle
Director: Tyler Oliver
I am not a teenager. I know that’s a shocking confession. Yet I am not immune to media targeted at young adult audiences. The Hunger Games books (and eventually the movie) are my current fascination. So a teen scream flick might not be in my demographic wheelhouse, but you never know, right? I decided to give Forget Me Not a whirl.
Forget Me Not is a pretty standard teen screamer. A group of good looking teenagers gets up to some mischief only to be haunted by some youthful indiscretion from the past.
In this case we have siblings Sandy and Eli (Carly Schroeder and Cody Linley), graduating from high school and on their way to a prestigious college with full scholarships and wealthy parents. Privileged children, indeed. Their friends are party kids, some from similar backgrounds, some from blue-collar households. All are free with their alcohol and drug consumption as well as their sexual exploits. They’ve been friends for years and have long forgotten a different sort of child, a little girl who played a silly graveyard game with them once when they were young. But she hasn’t forgotten them…
Okay, fine, it’s not great art. Or great film. Or even a good movie. But it isn’t all horrible, either. While each and every actor is terrible (either wooden or manic) and every character is a stereotype and behaves exactly as stupidly as expected (don’t go in there!), the plot has a nice little twist that makes it a little more interesting than the usual schtick. It’s also quite light on the gratuitous nudity. I know, not necessarily a positive for some connoisseurs of the genre, but I can do without dozens of shots of bouncing naked boobs, thanks. There are plenty of bouncing boobs, they’re just mostly covered.
The language is not horrible – it’s typical teenager. Forget Me Not garnered an R rating for language, sex, violence and teen alcohol/drug use, but it’s a far less egregious offender on all counts than others of its ilk. The language is bad but not ridiculous, the sex is abundant but not graphic and the violence is plentiful but hardly gory. The alcohol/drug use is plentiful but any kid who wants to see this has seen more and worse in most of their movies of choice. In general
Monster is Not Scary
I trust my kid not to use horror movie characters as role models – don’t they mostly get killed after behaving badly? That’s what I thought. I see the general restraint shown here as a benefit since those are the qualities of the genre that I find most distasteful as an adult.
Forget Me Not is not, unfortunately, scary. I lay the blame for that directly at the feet of the special effects. They suck. The ghosts/creatures/monsters look like cartoons wearing Scream masks trying to do the dance from Thriller. And failing. They’re a little creepy when they’re whipping around supernaturally fast just out of sight, but the minute they actually appear the only thing to fear is their acute badness. This sad fact takes the edge off of the fun of being jump-scared, one of the main reasons to see a teen screamer. On the plus side you can be a complete wuss and still say you watched a horror movie.
Overall, despite the horrible acting, ridiculously bad CGI and some overall general crappiness, Forget Me Not isn’t entirely atrocious. It has a decent little plot twist and despite its R rating shows a tiny bit of restraint on the gratuitous nudity and violence. It isn’t a movie I’ll watch again, but I can let my teenager watch it and feel like he’s been a little less corrupted than by other teen scream naked gore-fests. 2 stars for keeping the boobs covered.
Sue reads a lot, writes a lot, edits a lot, and loves a good craft. She was deemed “too picky” to proofread her children’s school papers and wears this as a badge of honor. She is also proud of her aggressively average knitting skills She is the Editorial Director at Silver Beacon Marketing and an aspiring Crazy Cat Lady.
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