User Reviews

Jason West (Aidan Bristow) has the tedious job of being a fashion photographer and having beautiful women throw themselves at him, which he handles like a man for better or worse. It seems Nicole (Stella March) his latest squeeze teases us with some butt shots and then she gets attacked by someone/ghost (mini plot spoiler) who looks like Jason's former girlfriend Ariana (Kai Elle) who we saw die in the opening clip...or did we as they never found a body.

Interpol Detective David Stone (Shan Serafin-director/writer) who works for Michael "Cameo" Madsen takes on the case.

The film incorporates the Japanese legend about the suicide forests of Fuji. It has the plot line of a Japanese horror, but not the characters with subtitles. Indeed our characters have a little more life to them in spite of the fact they are not that well developed. This is a horror film for people who like Japanese horror films, but don't like a lot of Japanese people in them.

The film does have scenes I enjoyed such as the David Stone in the forest by himself getting spooked.

The cover art is not connected to the film.

Guide: F-bomb. No sex. Butt nudity. Poster nudity.

This is one of the better ghost stories I've seen in a while! And the ending is creepsville. Not to give away too much but the final scenes totally will have you on edge!! You could say this is sort of like a Japanese Horror flick but, having seen "The Audition" and "Ringu," I'd say that this film isn't exactly of the same odd J-horror ilk. This is more like "The Ring" or "The Grudge." It's a more thoughtful movie, almost like a police story at first and then becomes a nightmare in the end. There is one shot that is insanely creepy. Actually a lot.

The shots of the Fuji forest are probably the real deal. Which helps. I got a little confused in the middle but the ending pretty much sums up the loose ends. It's not quite as well done as The Ring but it's in the same vane. Michael Madsen is good. And the hacker is great! If you want a good scare, this film will do it.

I saw this film at an advanced screening so I'm not sure what will blossom out of the current version. I heard some pretty wild comments from the audience. My feeling is that quite a few people didn't get all there was to get, which is probably just as well.

This is a spooky story, and set in the real life legend of Awoky Gara Forest (OMG I cannot EVEN spell that word) and that's extremely tantalizing, to see something real, a true phenomenon get played out on screen... but there's actually something really weird underneath all the chaos.

The main guy, Jayson is photographer. The validation that all the women around him seek seems to be the movie's central theme. It's sort of all disguised as a horror film, but the real horror is what happens to any human being when he or she gets infatuated with a lost love. That's what happens to the main girl, the blonde ghost.

I'm pretty sure this film is about the dense forest of the human soul--that if you lose yourself in the infatuation of another or the vanity of narcissism, your loss is permanent, and you become this demon like vulture, who tries to drag everyone else down, because now your codependent sense of self worth is eroded in your nagging need to be validated by a guy.

Buuuuuuuut, in this case it's not just any guy, it's a photographer, Jason. So he's not just a man, he's a lens. He's the great validator because he captures women's superficial beauty and immortalizes it. To the point where even the gorgeous naked girl in front of him, the first scene, hardly captures his attention at all, while instead he is engrossed in her 2 dimensional replication on the photographs. Every girl wants to be immortally beautiful. It's the vampire complex. (Not that this film has vampires in it, alas!) Jason provides it. But he's fickle. The woman seek him but he ends up turning them all down. That's the fleeting nature of the outward deification. The tighter you grab it, the more warped and contorted it will be as it oozes from your fist.

He pretty much says it all in the photo shoot, yelling at the dainty Japanese model, then seducing her proper poses. "He's over you but you like it. You love it. It's a good hurt" (paraphrased). And that's what finally primes the girl. The hurt. An endless pursuit of the hurt.

So I LOVED the ending. Made perfect sense. When the lens is cracked, and you'll get my reference when you see the film, the pain is over.

The meta-lingual references are pretty much tripled when you consider that Jason uses the video camera in the end to search for his nemesis and Koshi (sp?) uses the hallways monitors. In a sense, there is no reality for these people beyond what the camera allows them to see, a confined perspective. That's the pathology of it.

Solid performances for the most part bring a deceptively common dialog to life throughout the story. It's suspenseful and then it gets pretty scary. But, again, for me, the true worth is in the brutal excoriation of the human condition. Slash up on THAT!!!!

: )

There's a whole new crop of Indy horror makers who clearly have taken notes from the grandmasters (Carpenter, Craven, Kubrik) and now they're gonna be our next generation of greats. First we had Adam Green with his Frozen and Hatchet. Now we got Serafin, who's delivering a creepy pulse-driving cold-sweat nightmare of pure-sweet female violence. Love it. The J-Horror genre is sure to get a re-boost with this. The spirit is along the lines of The Ring or The Grudge, but I swear to God, there is that same adrenal rush of Aliens....in the end. Fantastic pay off makes everything tie together in a hellish journey of the last remaining character. Very innovative this bloke Serafin. Some stuff I hadn't quite seen before. And all of it is the real-deal Japanese Suicide Forest. The acting is decent all the way around, no stand out performances other than the hacker and of course mister on-scree-I'll-knife-you-in-the-jewels Michael Madsen. who, actually is pretty damn hilarious. Best horror movie I've seen this year and can't wait to see more from this group.