I hope no one will ever be so loony as to imagine
The Forsaken, directed and written by J.S. Cardone, to be one of the great vampire movies of all time, although I can
all too easily foresee a semiologically besotted film student going on a
binge deciphering the film's system of codes. Most obviously indebted to earlier
productions like Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (1987) and Joel Schumacher's
The
Lost Boys (1987), The Forsaken taps into the whole spinoff genre of horror films
that plunge hip young people into a witch's brew of sex, violence, and the
supernatural--a review in the Los Angeles Times by Miles Beller amusingly
described it as "an outing down 'Dawson's Creek' by way of the River
Styx". But this new release carries the
process of recycling so far that it seems as guilty of vampirism as any of its
villains.
At the beginning of the film, Sean (Kerr Smith),
who edits trailers for schlock movies, contracts to drive an expensively
restored Mercedes-Benz across the country to Miami in order to attend his
sister's wedding. No one would have difficulty in discovering the rudiments of a
quest narrative in this scenario, but Sean's quest is doomed to go wildly
awry--losing the valuable car turns out to be the least of his worries by the
end of The Forsaken. This "Childe Roland" goes to the Dark Tower, but
without any prospect of ever returning.
Early in the film Sean crosses an enormous bridge
over a chasm as he crosses into the Southwest, and like Hutter in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, once he crosses the bridge the phantoms come to meet him. First a
couple of girls in a sports car drive by and proposition him before mysteriously
disappearing. Then he gets a flat, causing him to swerve off the highway and
necessitating repair work that forces him to stay overnight in a seedy motel.
After a night of strange goings on that keep him awake, he encounters Nick
(Brendan Fehr), who wants to hitch a ride to Dallas, a proposal that Sean at
first rejects, leery of further possible obstacles to his trip.
But unfortunately, when he first arrived at the
motel Sean discovered that his wallet was missing, and the only money he has
remaining is some cash he intended to use for the wedding. So when Nick offers
to pay for gas, Sean reluctantly agrees to take him along. That night in a seedy
cafe, Nick notices a rather disturbed-looking young woman, Megan (Izbella Miko),
and pursues her when she exits. After she collapses on the street, Nick
insists--over the vehement objections of Sean--in taking her to the motel where
the two have put up for the night.
At this point, the action cuts to the exploits of
an ominous band of characters who have previously made a brief appearance and
turn out to be vampires. When the vampires attack some people who are partying,
the rather narcoleptic Megan--who, as it turns out, is under their telepathic
control--suddenly comes to life, requiring the combined efforts of Sean and Nick
to subdue her. Far more perplexed than before, the distraught Sean, sensing
himself further away than ever from completing his trip East, demands an
explanation.
Nick now reveals his true mission in life as a
vampire hunter. Just as in a classic paranoid fantasy, he, of course, is the
only person who realizes the extent of this threat to humanity. According to
him, the band of bloodsuckers they have encountered are infected with an
AIDS-like disease which they transmit to their victims. Until Nick is able to
find and destroy the Ur-vampire Kit (Johnathon Schaech) who is the leader of the
band, all he can do is slow down the progress of the disease with drugs for a
time--not stop it. Sadly, Sean only learns these facts after Megan has bitten
him, thus tainting his own blood.
The remainder of the film is a series of
cliff-hanging incidents as the vampires pursue the trio, a peregrination through
the wilds of Texas at the end of which the three of them take refuge with the
elderly owner of a ranch, Ina Hamm (Carrie Snodgrass), before Sean succeeds in
trapping Kit and exposing him to the deadly rays of the rising sun. In the final
scene, in a weird variation on one of the conventions of the buddy movie that
goes back to the Leatherstocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Sean leaves
the now presumably cured Megan, and rides off into the sunset with Nick to hunt
vampires forever.
The Forsaken wades headlong into the paranoid
waters that have been inundating American popular culture for some time now, and
even manages to plunge in a bit further than most of its predecessors. Many
examples of what I have elsewhere called the paranoid genre raise the question:
Who knows any longer what is and is not normal? But nevertheless these works
still require a facade of normality to play off against. The locus classicus
here would be The X Files with its dedicated FBI agents, Scully and Mulder, who
keep digging up all the skeletons the Bureau itself wants to keep buried.
But in The
Forsaken, normality itself seems to
have vanished of the face of the earth. Apart from a few scenes at the beginning
and end, the bulk of the action takes place in the most God-forsaken parts of
Arizona and Texas, making the wasteland of T.S. Eliot's famous poem look like
The Paradise of Earthly Delights in comparison. And when Nick delivers a
heavy-handed blast against contemporary values, including a graphic allusion to
the sexual misdeeds of Bill Clinton, the movie could hardly make it clearer that
the choice of setting is more metaphorical than functional.
However, The Forsaken's heroes never seem to
understand how deeply implicated they themselves are in this fallen world. When
Nick enlightens Sean, he introduces the latter to the term "the
forsaken"--meaning evidently forsaken by God--and explains that it refers
to the vampires. Yet, ironically, Sean and Nick are no less "forsaken"
than the vampires. Early on, Nick relates that his father had abandoned his
mother shortly after he was born, and Nick counters that his father was a
cross-dressing Marine. The decline and fall of American values lurks in every
corner where the movie casts its gaze, as if it--and not the vampirism inducing
virus--were the real evil everyone should be hunting down.
On the other hand, the most interesting contrast
that appears in the film is not with the conventions of the paranoid genre, but
with one of the most basic premises of the classic horror genre. Although horror
films set in the United States have been common for decades now, the most
well-known horror pictures of the early 1930s all take place abroad. Even in the
1940s, when Universal wanted to make horror films with an American setting, it
still had to import its monsters from places like Transylvania or Egypt. In
those days, horror rarely flourished on American soil.
In particular, the typical setting of the classic
horror film seems associated with a xenophobically colored image of the Old
World. In a famous statement, Edgar Allan Poe declared that terror is not of
Germany, but the soul; however, Universal paid little heed to his advice and
made Central Europe the preeminent locale of screen horror in its series of
Frankenstein films. Nor would Walt Disney have had to look any
further than the scenography of James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein to find
inspirations for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, released only a few years
after the Whale opus.
According to this fabulous topography, the Old
World was the gloomy home of depraved aristocrats, and of the even more depraved
henchmen--like Rigoletto in Verdi's opera--who served them. But the so-called New World was always
"virgin land," where life could be perpetually started anew out on the
frontier--although by the time the first full-length motion pictures were being made in this
country, the frontier had been officially declared closed. But no worry as long
as it could be revived on celluloid! By contrast, the tone of
The Forsaken is established by
the opening shots of an auto junkyard where Sean goes to pick up the Mercedes.
This is no "virgin land," but a prematurely old one, littered and
disfigured by the debris of industrial production.
The Forsaken is hardly ever innovative,
although Cardone is
very inventive in coming up with new crises to challenge Sean and Nick, and the
movie does contain a couple of good shots, particularly when the sun rises to
vanquish Kit. Nevertheless, the film's strong point
is the gifted editing of Norman Buckley, who keeps the rapid tempo going right
up to the end so that the film's manifest imperfections are not so immediately
evident.
None of the acting is better than moderately
competent, and most of the dialogue is painfully unimaginative, with the
misogynistic males obsessively and repetitively hurling the "b" word
at every woman in sight. Still, there is nothing pretentious about the film,
which makes no apologies for its blatant display of violence and which for
brief instants made me nostalgically recall the pleasures of great
"B" productions of days of yore. The Forsaken isn't a very good
film, but it's not
such a bad one, either.
Production
data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database
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