The critic blurb on the front of the VHS cover of The Forsaken reads “Terrifying! The sexiest vampire movie since ‘The Lost Boys’!”  Having never watched The Lost Boys, I can’t say much about that except perhaps there haven’t been any sexy vampire movies between 1987 and 2001.  I find that hard to believe.

We start out with a bloody naked chick showering while split-second screens of some past event flash by really quickly.  Get used to that shitty device, because we’ll be seeing lots of it.

Cut to generic panning shots of a Los Angeles highway to fill up time before we cut to our “hero” Sean at some mechanic’s place.  He gets contracted to deliver a newly-rebuilt Mercedes to Miami.

It’s kind of a plot point that this is a beautiful, awesome car.  Since I’m not a car guy, I’ll just take their word for it.  The owner doesn’t want a single scratch on the car, which is fair.  But I don’t get how the owner needs to have the car built in Los Angeles and delivered to fucking Miami and expect nothing will go wrong.

But it turns out Sean actually does have a regular job, and he needs to convince his boss to give him a week’s vacation.  Which he does.  Okay then.  We could’ve saved some casting and shooting time if we just went with Sean being a driver-for-hire.  Oh, and he says something about attending his sister’s wedding in Miami, which is presumably why he wanted to take on a delivery job to Miami in the first place.  He mentions his sister a few more times in the movie, but no one gives a crap.  It doesn’t add to his character at all, and it’s flimsy reasoning for his driving to Florida.

Anyway, we spent the next few minutes with just Sean enjoying his ride while he’s around Arizona.

He randomly gets a flat after passing by a car full of sluts (hey, B-movies thrive on an expectation of full frontal nudity) and has to stay the night at a motel while the tire gets replaced.  Also, he seems to have lost his wallet someplace, so he has to use the money he had saved for a gift for his sister.  As far as anyone can tell, he’s been driving this whole time.  Where the hell is he going to lose his wallet?  Did it spontaneously fly out of the car?

Sean notices some creepy happenings at his motel.  Allegedly.  It sounds like sex is happening in the room next to his, but then he hears some weird growling.  And THEN he hears… um… I dunno, but it causes him to have a guitar freakout.

There is a LOT of this kind of scene in this movie, and it’s never NOT cheesy and terrible.

The next day, the tire on his car is fixed, and he’s ready to hit the road.  At least until a hitchhiker named Nick shows up and persuades Sean to take him in; when the douchebag guilt trip argument doesn’t work, he offers to pay for gas.

During their drive, they encounter a group of weirdos having car trouble.  The leader of the group is blatantly suspicious: he’s bossy, seems to put no emotion into his speech, and every time he talks, he seems to actively try to make it sound like there’s some underlying significance to it (it just makes him sound pretentious).

The two groups part ways.  Just outside a bar, Nick meets with a chick undergoing withdrawals.  Or coping with turning into a vampire.  I always get those two mixed up.  Nick convinces Sean to bring her in to a motel, where Nick treats her “sickness.”

Nick searches all over the girl’s body for bite marks.  It seems like he screwed up and just picked up and took advantage of a druggie… until he finds the bite mark just above her nethers.  Naturally, Sean freaks out when he finds that Nick has just stripped that girl they picked up off the streets.

Nick just happens to have something in his bag that should help the girl.  A syringe.  Whoo.  The girl does a lot of freaking out though, and it gains the attention of the manager, who seems to have been told to dress like Ace Ventura (complete with monkey) and seems to have some kind of speech impediment.

During the freakout, the girl bites Sean.  Nick doesn’t give Sean the full story just yet because he, like everyone in this movie, is a colossal douchebag.

The conflict picks up when the vampire group rolls in the way they always do: with maximum pretentiousness.



Nick takes the opportunity to show Sean what’s really going on in what is probably the only good scene in this movie.

That weird feeling Sean’s been having since waking up?  That’s him slowly turning into a vampire since that chick bit him.

Apparently, the story is that Nick was bitten by a vampire, but with the use of a drug, he’s been able to slow his turning.  People bitten by vampires are under a curse or infection (it isn’t very clear which it is) that can only be cured by slaying the source of the strain.  In Nick’s case, it’s the suspicious-looking guy they met earlier.  Nick has been hunting for him this whole time.  But, he can’t kill him that easily.  See, that guy’s a Forsaken – one of the original eight vampires who formed a pact with the demon Abbadon.  Forsaken can only be killed by cutting off their head or exposing them to sunlight, and ONLY when they’re on sacred ground.  Like a church.

Long, dragged-on story short, Sean is given some of the drug Nick uses to slow his turn.  The girl, on the other hand, is only shot full of morphine to knock her out.  The Forsaken is drawn to those they’ve turned, so Nick plans to use the girl as bait to drive the vampires to an old Spanish mission.  Team Vamp chases them and kills people along the way.  The Mercedes gradually takes damage until it’s turned into a spectacular wreck.  EVENTUALLY, the heroes make it to some shack in the middle of nowhere, where an old lady with a shotgun lives alone.  She wants the boys out, but lets them stay when she sees how the girl needs help.  By the time we get to this point in the story, Sean has convinced Nick to give the girl the cocktail and use Sean as the bait instead.  Just FYI.

Oh, and Nick gives Sean his wallet.  Yeah, Nick just happened to find the wallet on the road while he was hitchhiking.  He had it all this time and never gave it back.  Sean says “that’s fucked up.”  Understatement.  Also, damn near pointless.  I mean yeah, Sean probably would have left Nick’s ass behind if he didn’t need the gas money, but still.  The wallet going missing in the first place is a stupid contrivance.

When the old lady asks about the girl, they respond that the girl hasn’t said shit about her since they picked her up, confirming that I am not crazy, and they did not in fact offer her name yet.  The old lady seems to offer an answer when she drops a newspaper on the counter.  Seems the girl was the survivor of some bloody massacre earlier in the week.

We see a collage of flashback scenes from the girl’s attack.  It’s still a little difficult to piece together, but when we get back to real time, the girl is finally coherent and outright TELLS them what happened.  Well, to the best of her recollection, anyway.  Her family was randomly attacked one night.  The vampire bit her, then walked away and told some other female to kill her.  The girl (Megan; yes, it’s almost the end of the movie and we finally learn her name) doesn’t know what happened next, but we can assume she somehow managed to kill the girl and escape in a daze.

Team Vamp (which has been whittled down to exactly two people) arrives, and the heroes do that thing where they try not to make a noise, and out of fucking nowhere, JUST to increase the tension, a huge-ass tarantula crawls up Megan’s arm.  I shit you not.

Sean notices some gravestones, and the old lady tells them her house was built on an old Spanish cemetery.  Which makes her house sacred ground.  Which means they don’t have to make it to that mission after all.  They can kill the Forsaken here!  HOW CONVENIENT!

The Forsaken makes it in and loses his pretentious speech in favor for his more natural southern drawl (and keep in mind, this guy was originally an eastern European knight, so that makes no fucking sense).  He gets shot a few times by Nick, and Sean tries to finish him off by ramming the Mercedes into him.

The car dies, and it seems they’re screwed.  But the sun comes up, and the Forsaken dies.

So, Megan’s cured, Sean’s cured, the two go their separate ways, and Nick leaves and leaves Sean a note saying he still needs to hunt another Forsaken.  Turns out the one they killed WASN’T the origin of the strain that’s affecting Nick.

Sean (now riding Team Vamp’s old ride) finds Nick on the road after months of searching, and he suggests they team up to hunt the other Forsaken.  The last visual of the movie is of their car driving away.

Oh, and the owner of the Mercedes was pissed as fuck.  No word on if Sean had to pay for any of that.  Also no word on what became of Sean’s sister.  Not that anyone would care.

So yeah, the two go off on a blatant sequel pitch that never went anywhere, and thank goodness for that.  We really didn’t need more of this.

Going back to the critic blurb, I don’t see what about this movie was “sexy.”  I guess there’s the presence of bare breasts, but that’s not necessarily sexy.

The Forsaken’s motivation is downright retarded.  Yeah, he feeds on human blood.  That’s par for the course.  But why is he a colossal douchebag that just kills and tortures people for no reason?  Seriously, let’s take a look at his list of onscreen kills:

1.  His group happens upon a beach party.  He asks for beer.  They spray some in his face.  He tears a guy’s heart out.  This is fair, I guess.

2. In a flashback, he kills Megan’s family.  He bites Megan above her crotch, turning her.  He leaves and orders his girl to shoot Megan.  WTF?

3. He shotguns the motel manager.

4. He just finished having a night of fun with his latest victim (who is still alive).  Nick just drove a car through their room, and there’s a gas leak that could blow any moment.  He orders his lackey to shoot the girl before running away from the soon-to-blow room.

5. He shoots a highway patrol officer for checking the trunk (he’s hiding in the trunk since he can’t be out in daylight).  He then orders his lackey to dowse the officer’s body and car with gasoline and light it on fire.

6. He separates two redneck truckers.  One of them is feasted on by his partner.  The other begs for his life before the Forsaken taunts him, then shoots him in the head.

The guy’s just a douchebag psycho, and his being a vampire is barely played at.  Most of the kills in this movie are due to gunfire.  It’s ridiculous.

On the plus side, the origin of the Forsaken is pretty quality lore, and we do get some badass killing scenes from time to time.  It’s just hard to take it seriously considering what the rest of the movie is: flimsy excuses to move the cast from one location to the other (and in the case of the vampires, not even; they just kill random people) and stupid pretentious editing.  And nudity.

Again, the only real reason to watch this movie is Izabella Miko’s bare chest.  Not that she has a notable chest.  She’s just a fine specimen overall.