February Review Blitz: Forest of Death

So I decided to give the Pang Brothers a third chance. They’ve made so many movies, after all, they can’t all be as flawed as The Eye and Re:Cycle, right? But…three strikes and you’re out, boys. Sorry. Forest of Death is even worse than either of their other films I watched.

Somewhere unspecified in China, there is a vast, deep forest where people like to go to off themselves, for whatever reason. The number of suicides there is tabloid fodder, but it gets even more sensational when a woman turns up dead in the forest…only she didn’t kill himself (though not for lack of trying), she was raped and murdered. The cops are pretty sure they have the right guy in Patrick Wong, a slimy fellow who wears his Oxford shirt buttoned all the way up (a sure sign of a psycho killer if there ever was one; that should be evidence admissible in court), but there’s no physical evidence against him.

Detective CC Ha, the only female detective in her precinct, has been assigned to wrap up the case before her boss retires. She’s stumped, until she sees a botanist on TV explaining his pseudo-scientific BS theory about how plants are sentient and can communicate with humans through magnetic waves or some shit. Anyway, Detective CC Ha (I am going to use her full title and name because it looks funny typed out) calls up Dr. Shum Shu-Hoi (played by Ekin Cheng, who has grown from Pretty Boy to Foxy Man, although maturity has done nothing to improve his acting) and asks him to help a girl out. He eagerly takes off to the Forest of Death with all his equipment, and Detective CC Ha brings Patrick Wong out as well. The trees reveal to them what happened- he totally did it- and Shu-Hoi is suddenly sent from poor obscure fringe scientist to instant celebrity. It causes tension in his relationship with his girlfriend, May, a whiny, clingy little bitch who is also a TV reporter who has been reporting on the Forest of Death.

Even though the murder is solved in a spectacularly anticlimactic manner, Detective CC Ha isn’t satisfied; she wants to tackle all the missing persons and unidentified suicides lost and found in the forest. She’s helped by wise old park ranger Mr. Tin, whose daughter also killed herself in the forest. Mr. Tin warns them not to meddle because there are, of course, all sorts of supernatural things haunting the forest, from ghosts to fox spirits to whatever. They persist until May, after being yelled at by her big meanie producer, decides to kill herself and goes to the Forest of Death.  Of course she runs off right as a big thunderstorm rolls in, gets kidnapped by the ghosts or foxes or whatever, and is rescued by Shu-hoi, which makes every problem in their relationship A-OK and saves the souls of all the dead people in the forest or something.

The main problem with Forest of Death is that it’s, well, boring, badly-acted, not scary in the least, and it doesn’t make sense. There are a couple intriguing ideas, but they never go anywhere, ditched in favor of the lame relationship crap- the fox spirits, and one scene where an elderly woman identifies one of the bodies found in the forest as her brother, who has been missing for forty years- though he only looks to be about twenty years old. The plant communication thing is too ridiculous even for the suspension of disbelief required by horror movies. The story arc should have ended with the discovery of the murderer; everything that comes after is disjointed and uninteresting, as if the writers thought they could change the characters’ goals halfway through the film, discovered they actually couldn’t, then decided they didn’t give a shit and tacked together a bunch of gibberish to pad the time to an hour and a half.

The acting is not great; no one seems to be trying very hard (though Rain Li, who plays May, does a pretty good pout…for the entire freaking movie). Luckily Shu-hoi and Detective CC Ha don’t do any flirting- thank God, because they have zero chemistry.

The special effects are decent; lots of fog and a few wispy specters floating around the forest. Much of the grand finale is shot in the dark, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on. Not like you care at this point, but it’s still annoying.

The movie ends with a text warning of sorts, that there are three other forests in the world just like the Forest of Death (meaning, presumably, that people like to commit suicide there), but doesn’t name any of them, just mentions vaguely which continents they’re on. It claims that the number of suicides in the Japanese version of the Forest of Death has risen incredibly in past few years (there actually is a forest like this in Japan, I remember reading an article about it some time ago), though it doesn’t bother attempting speculation on why- if the claim is ever true. I suppose we are meant to think the fox spirits or ghosts are out to get people who are already planning to die, for supernatural reasons of their own.

The Verdict: Living people cannot possibly fathom the logic of a fox spirit. Or the Pang Brothers.