Not to be confused with Tobe Hooper’s 2000 creature feature of the same name, the 1979 Crocodile is a Filipino export that never would have seen these shores, if not for the monster success of Jaws prompting every huckster with access to a camera to cash in quickly. It’s all your fault, Mr. Spielberg.

Swiped from the Godzilla template (right down to the atomic-testing angle), the wafer of a story has a giant crocodile wreaking havoc as it flattens a different beach community every three days on the dot. One of its first victims is the young daughter of a doctor (Nard Poowanai), prompting the kind of personal revenge in direct opposition of the Hippocratic Oath. When sharing the screen with live humans, most of what audiences see of our reptilian villain are close-ups of a blinking eye and, rarer, close-ups of chomping jaws … with the wire that makes it work in clear view.

One character exclaims, “He destroyed an entire village as if were a toy!” (Because that’s more or less what the to-be-demolished sets are: models.) Continues the man, “Our crocodile is a mutant! By god, a mutant!”

And by god, is this film wretched! Testing the definition of “watchable,” director Sompote Sands (Magic Lizard) mattress-pads the running time with so many emergency sirens, so many typhoons, so many upturned docks, so much context-challenged stock footage and not enough of the extras who clearly have filled their cheeks with stage blood, ready to spit it out when told. Lord knows shameless producers Dick Randall (Pieces) and Herman Cohen (The Headless Ghost) had their hands in some real turds throughout their careers, but Crocodile — their only project together — is a mile-high Pinoy pile of it. —Rod Lott

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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.