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

Get it at Amazon.

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

Get it at Amazon.