Main cast: Kerr Smith (Sean), Brendan Fehr (Nick), Izabella Miko (Megan), Johnathon Schaech (Kit), Phina Oruche (Cym), Simon Rex (Pen), and Carrie Snodgress (Ina Hamm)
Director: JS Cardone
The real monsters in this movie are the minimally-talented refugees from Fox and Warner Bros on TV. Kerr Smith (Dawson’s Creek) and Brendan Fehr (Roswell), the former from a dying TV show and the latter from a cancelled TV show, try to create a career outside their TV roles by starring in cult movie maker JS Cardone’s vampire road trip movie. The joke’s on them. This movie may as well be called Y Tu Momma of All Borefest.
Sean is assigned to drive a fancy Mercedes across the country to Miami from LA, passing through what seems like endless stretches of desert and dirty motels. After thirty minutes of pointless scenes of Kerr Smith in undershirt and boxers jumping around his motel room – okay, maybe these filler scenes are for eye candy purposes (that young man has very nice biceps, I may admit), but the scenes drag on and on – he picks up a hitchhiker, Nick. Oh, Brendan Fehr still looks like an over-pale doughy fratboy no matter how much stubble he tries to neatly groom on his face. They then encounter a scary gang led by Kit and later rescue a young woman, Megan.
These seemingly unconnected events soon come to a head when Megan bites Sean and Nick tells Sean that Megan and Nick are actually vampire victims. Now Sean can join their happy threesome. Lucky for them, modern medicine has founded some drugs that let them stave off the impending vampirism for as long as a few years. (Like most modern vampire movies, this one also attempts to tie vampirism to AIDS even in a loose way.) To be cured completely, they must kill the vampire who infected them – in this case, it’s Kit.
For a vampire movie filled with gratuitous gore, female upper body nudity, and even misogyny (Megan is basically manhandled by our two lead characters throughout the movie) very little actually happens in The Forsaken. The heroes and the dead weight heroine seem to spend all their time wandering around aimlessly, and same with the vampires. After so many years of wandering, I’d expect Kit to have some money at least to buy a better car and clothes.
The scenery is nice to look at, but in the end, the real attraction of this movie is the predictably homoerotic undertones between Nick and Sean. For an actor who just can’t stop reminding everybody that he’s straight, Kerr Smith sure can bring on the boy-boy love like a pro. The ending is a pure paean to summertime homoerotica – Sean actually walks away from the hot Megan to look for Nick, only to have his fingers tremble emotionally as he rips open Nick’s Dear John letter. Later, he will search high and low all over the country until he finds Nick again, and together, they drive off into the sunset, no doubt to a motel where they can work off their suppressed urges without that baggage Megan interfering with their lusty urges. I’m not joking or making this up – Sean is actually heartbroken over Nick. It’s so touching.
Also, check out the playful scene where Kit asks his male victim to get down on his knees before the man – ooh – before Kit blows the man’s brains out.
Maybe they shouldn’t have put the vampires in this movie and just focus on the bubbling boy-love thing. Or maybe vampires are actually metaphors for disapproving priests waiting to suck out all joy from our closeted queens? Who knows. But The Forsaken, while being more fruitty than a fruit loop, is more like an aimless overlong metaphor for teenagers during the Stonewall Era rather than an enjoyable genuine B-grade T&A vampire classic it wanted to be. Mr Smith and Mr Fehr will have to look a little harder for their breakthrough roles. Although I suspect they’ll do very well in a gay love movie. Who knows?
