Forget Me Not (2009)

 

Sandy Channing and her brother, Eli, are teenagers on the cusp of attending college.  To celebrate the end of the academic year, they attend a party at their friend T.J.'s house. Many of the people at the party are long term friends of theirs, and the whole group of them go to the graveyard to play a spooky, ghost-themed version of 'tag'.

A new girl their age meets them at the cemetery and asks to join the game. There is some reluctance, but when she proves to already know how it works, they agree.

The new girl wins the game by evading capture the longest. She then asks Sandy if Sandy remembers her. Sandy says she does not, and the girls states, "You will," before jumping from the cliff behind her.

Sandy, understandably, freaks out.  The kids call the police, who arrive and search the base of the cliff, but are unable to find a body.

Sandy's friends are all willing to chalk off the experience as weird but ultimately unimportant - the girl probably knew a safe way down, and then ran off - but Sandy herself thinks something far more sinister is going on.  And this is, of course, the kind of movie where such suspicions are well-founded.

Forget Me Not is a tale of ghostly vengeance.  It's a fairly low budget production, a fact that occasionally undermines it.  For instance, there's a scene where someone is trapped in a "pit", and it's pretty obvious that the walls of the alleged pit are fake.  I actually saw them shift at one point.

Fortunately, the limited resources don't seem to have extended to the cast.  They are mostly pretty good in their roles, even if they're almost all clearly much older than the characters they are portraying.

Said characters, it should be noted, are frequently not especially nice people.  They're certainly not all bad enough to merit being murdered, but they're in a horror film, so I don't think it is much of a spoiler to tell you that grisly fates are definitely on the cards for at least some of them!

The variety and execution of kill scenes is a common metric of quality for hardcore fans of horror films, and if it's one that is important to you, I think Forget Me Not should satisfy.  The film's deaths are nicely varied and come with decent regularity.  The staging is not always the best, as already noted, but some are done well and there is some nicely creepy make-up at times, even if in many cases the 'spooky monsters' don't do a lot more than stand around looking ghastly.

Probably my favourite sequence of the film, though, has nothing to do with the kills.  It's an early section where we see Sandy getting ready for her day, which is intercut with a comatose hospital patient going through a similar process at the hands of her carers.  It's quite nicely done, and pleasingly avoids being too skeevy, which it could easily have become given that it involves two attractive young women bathing and getting dressed.

Overall, Forget Me Not doesn't break much new ground, but it's a relatively solid low budget horror offering.