If a tree falls in The Forest, well … that might wake this lumbering giant of a horror picture. Lord knows it could use it.

You know the rumor about how an identical twin can sense when something is wrong with the other, even if they’re on opposite sides of the globe? This whole movie hangs on that unproven ESP connection. Sara (Natalie Dormer, TV’s Game of Thrones) lives in America; her sister, Jess (also Dormer, but with dark hair), in Japan. When Jess enters the Aokigahara Forest — famed for being a suicide hot spot — and doesn’t come out, the authorities consider the young woman to be a goner. Sara, however, believes otherwise, because she doesn’t “feel” anything undue. Insisting Jess is still alive, she nonetheless hops a flight to find her.

Once in Japan, everyone Sara meets tells her that she would be crazy to enter the forest, and that bad things will happen if she does. So, with the aid of a travel-mag writer (Taylor Kinney, TV’s Chicago Fire) she just met in a bar, she does exactly that, and bad things happen. Because the place is haunted by the souls of the damned, those bad things are primarily cheap jump scares.

Unlike our heroine, viewers aren’t likely to get lost in The Forest, because first-time feature director Jason Zada (co-writer of The Houses October Built) follows the template established by nearly every PG-13 horror film funded by a major studio; everything you expect to happen, does. At best, The Forest is subpar supernatural, beginning with legitimate ambience (as did another American-girl-in-Japan tale, The Grudge), squandering that once Sara enters the titular site, and cribbing its lone good bit directly from Insidious.

Nothing about The Forest is original, but no one expects it to be. They do expect horror not to be a chore to watch, no matter how well-photographed. Taking their minor characters’ advice to heart, Zada and company are so careful not to stray from the well-trodden path followed by countless others before them, they fail to see The Forest for the trees. —Rod Lott

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In the Trianglesploitation feature The Bermuda Triangle, Mexploitation royalty Réne Cardona Jr. (Guyana: Cult of the Damned) is able to do what so many documentaries, works of fiction and real-life scientists have not: Pinpoint the reason for all the ships and aircraft that have vanished inexplicably from the Atlantic Ocean region roughly half-million square miles. The answer is so damned “Purloined Letter“-level obvious, I’m amazed no one thought of it earlier: a creepy, possessed doll. Of course!

The waterlogged plaything is plucked from the salty Caribbean by a crew member of the Black Whale III, aboard which is a vacationing family headed by salty ol’ Edward (legendary director John Huston in one of his many baffling late-career paycheck acting gigs à la Tentacles and The Visitor). Edward gives it to his youngest moppet, Diana (Gretha, a unimonikered newcomer who evidently succumbed to the Triangle herself after this), thus setting off a swath of unusual happenings that irk the fam and ship’s captain (frequent Cardona star Hugo Stiglitz, The Night of a Thousand Cats) far more than fog and storms.

Up first? Diana’s request to the chef (Jorge Zamora, Romancing the Stone) that her doll craves a bite of raw meat. Later brings an attack by green birds, waves a-sizzlin’ with Alka-Seltzer tablets, SOS signals from a ghost ship, reverse-footage nightmares and, while hunting and harpooning sharks for sport, a seaquake that knocks over the only stone pillars on the ocean floor, trapping Edward’s older, of-age daughter (Italian sex symbol Gloria Guida, How to Seduce Your Teacher) and claiming her lovely gams to the point of amputation.

To make matters worse, Diana also starts yammering about how everyone is going to die, and in what order. She confidently “predicts” Simon will be first to meet his maker — no stretch since he is the film’s lone black character — and asks, “What color will Simon be when he dies: purple or white?”

As if you needed telling, The Bermuda Triangle is two hours of primo pepper jack cheese: dubbed voices, slapdash editing, a story that fails (forgets?) to follow threads to their ends. The movie just kinda sorta ends, with an onscreen crawl of the Triangle’s supposed transportation victims, culminating with the ominous warning: “WHO WILL BE THE NEXT?” Well, no one, Mr. Cardona, considering planes and boats are a “what,” not a “who.” Highly recommended, the schizophrenic flick is best enjoyed the way Edward’s alcoholic brother-in-law does throughout: with J&B on endless loop. —Rod Lott

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No offense is meant to Leslie Bibb, a genial actress with bona fide comedic flair (from Talladega Nights to Hell Baby), but she looks as if she were genetically engineered to play a flight attendant. Her striking, all-American features combine for the kind of friendly face commercial air carriers look for when employing ambassadors for beverage service at 37,000 feet. While Bibb’s Laura may be an ideal hire for the fictional Vista Pacific Airlines, she cannot save Flight 7500 from interminable boredom. The film is flawed from its initial taxi down the runway.

Passengers board a red-eye flight that will take them from Los Angeles to Tokyo … or at least that’s the intent. With air travel, so many variables loom as threats: severe weather, mechanical failure and, if your movie’s director is Japanese, a high probability of a supernatural haunting. With The Grudge’s Takashi Shimizu in the proverbial cockpit here, the latter is at play: an invisible force that chokes the life out of frequent fliers in the most predictable and detaching ways.

One wonders if Shimizu and screenwriter Craig Rosenberg (2009’s The Uninvited, an underrated spooker) have attempted to imbue this routine horror film with a statement on the state of the modern marriage in these United States. Consider that Laura is playing “Coffee, tea or me?” with the married pilot (Jonathon Schaech, The Legend of Hercules), and that the other four main characters are either in a dissolved union (Crank’s Amy Smart and Knights of Badassdom’s Ryan Kwanten) or newly part of one already doomed to collapse (Hall Pass’ Nicky Whelan and Entourage’s Jerry Ferrara).

Or at least I wondered that, because the movie failed to grab me, and when it comes to horror, I’m a fairly easy lay. It’s no wonder Flight 7500 took four years to land a stateside release on DVD, after originally being made for theaters. While Shimizu is a competent filmmaker, this elicits not even a fraction of the fear of his greatest hit (or hits, plural, if you lump in his own remake). While welcome, the ending succeeds only in insulting its audience, followed by an unscary jump scare that doesn’t even make sense within the story’s timeline. —Rod Lott

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While not all J-horror entries are required to be compared to Hideo Nakata’s massively influential Ringu (remade for Yanks as The Ring, of course), it’s nigh impossible to discuss Yôichi Nishiyama’s Gurozuka without drawing the comparison. With automatic thanks to a rumored videotape on which the narrative must hinge, the similarities are too strong, ultimately to this film’s detriment.

With an all-female cast, the imported spookshow follows two high school groups collaborating on a project for class: the Movie Club, all two members of it, and the Drama Club, more popular since it numbers a big, fat three. Virtually doubling as cliques, both clubs can be defined by their members’ behavior toward others: respectively, goody-two-shoes and snooty bitches. With teacher Ms. Yoko as their chaperone, the nice girls and mean girls venture deep into the woods to shoot an improvisational film. Looking not unlike an Asian Sarah Palin, Ms. Yoko (Yûko Itô, Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust) is despised by the girls, who suspect she is having an improper relationship with Takako (Nozomi Andô, Tomie: Forbidden Fruit), the strange and silent pupil tagging along for this field trip.

Mind you, the above paragraph delivers far more background than Nishiyama needs to give his audience, other than to set up Takako as a social outcast and, therefore, a de facto red herring. The real story kicks in at the abandoned lodge in which they stay, because that’s where the Movie Clubbers stumble upon the creepy Super 8 footage that serves as the Zapruder film in Gurozuka’s world: a legendary reel depicting — or capturing, hmmm? — a woman in a demon mask slicing up her “co-star”: a fellow student of the schoolgirls who never was heard from again.

Furthermore, this found footage reportedly was shot on the lodge grounds … yet with this being a horror film, “reportedly” can be jettisoned. That demon woman still sports that undeniably unsettling mask and still grasps that same sharp implement and, yep, still remains on-site. I wish there were more to the flick than that, but — as is the case with the majority of J-horror movies — predictability reigns supreme. That’s not to say Gurozuka can’t be enjoyed half-heartedly, provided expectations are cut into simplified fractions; it helps that 84 minutes is all Nishiyama asks of your time for a work so reliant on the ideas of other films before it, including a scene lifted wholesale from Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. (Domo arigato, Samuel.) —Rod Lott

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Zoinks! Spencer Parsons’ Saturday Morning Mystery winkingly makes the opening-credits claim that it is “a real story based on actual televised events.” That is its cheeky way of hinting at — if not quite acknowledging, for legal reasons — that, yes, the movie is perfectly aware its characters and setup resemble TV’s still-chugging Scooby-Doo. That is Saturday Morning Mystery’s point, its selling point and, ultimately, its point of no return.

Unknowns Adam Tate, Josephine Decker, Jonny Mars and Ashley Rae Spillers fill the role archetypes of, respectively, Fred, Daphne, Shaggy and Velma. (Hamlet, their nonspeaking Great Dane, plays himself.) The paranormal-hunting foursome is hired to investigate a mansion that once housed a private school with religion-based curriculum; rumors of satanic sacrifice, an open gate to hell and the occasional meddling kid have plagued the site ever since. With Hamlet in tow and on a leash, the group members unload their van, set up their equipment and steel themselves for an unpredictable night.

Much of what happens in those dark hours would cause William Hanna and Joseph Barbera to turn beet-red, if they were still alive to see it. In other words, the film’s R rating is entirely warranted.

People drawn to Saturday Morning Mystery strictly because of the Scooby-Doo “connection” are bound to be disappointed. Parsons’ work is not a parody of the beloved cartoon; Warner Bros.’ sanctioned pair of live-action comedies better adhere to that description. This is also more or less humorless, despite a sunny, cheerful title that conjures loving images of sugary cereal and hours of entertainment while the parentals slept in. Saturday Morning Mystery is a mumblecore treatment of in-vogue supernatural horror dripping with Gen X nostalgia; therefore, it is less an actual story and more a concept — one that still requires some fleshing out. At least it is interesting in its shortcomings — no easy task, that. —Rod Lott

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