The Movie Haunted Forest by Ian Lorenos

The movie Haunted Forest by Ian Lorenos may be a good film for wimps but for those who has a lot of experiences in horror and gore movies, this might make you yawn a little bit due to the repetition of flow. The matching of the teen-main cast were off, the personalities of the created love teams (Jane-Jameson; Maris-Jon) did not match due to the absence of chemistry. Lastly, the loudness and the chosen score is not effective.

The film has a lot of failures but the story, the cinematography and the individuality of the artists help to cope the lacking though the redundancy of the style and the predictable flow is still obvious. Haunted Forest is the only horror entry in the 43Rd Metro Manila Film Festival (starring Jane Oineza, Maris Racal, Jameson Blake, Jon Lucas, Raymart Santiago, and Joey Marquez) but it offers no advantages. As expected in this entry, few things are new to be serve in the audience and that is not new about Filipino horror movie. It’s like a tradition in our country that our produced films were creepy.

In this film, they used a new supernatural entity and that is the so-called “sitsit”. That was the first time they used this mythical creature in a movie. This thing based on the story, is a supernatural creature that preys on women at night and is believe to be the cause of sudden deaths of women in the night. It does not mean that they just add few elements can make their film more appreciating to the audience.

Failure as it is because they were not able to made their audiences scream because it’s not worth doing it, after all it was marketed and produced as a horror film in genre so what’s the sense of it but Ian Lorenos do have an explanation about that. As what he said in his interview, he described his own directing in the film as a mixture of Regal Film’s usual style on the horror and his own take on the genre and that the production team decided to put more organic horror elements in the film aside from relying on scaring the audience by surprise while adding that the film had story and lessons. He stated that this film as an all-in-one film being horror, family story and love story while making sure the film would not have the impression of being mishmash. It is true that you can get a moral lesson from it but the film really became jambled because of the mixed genre they used.

This Film is like experimentation, preparing us to another sequel and compiled many problems that the movie had lost its composure. It is almost as if Lorenos and his team are desperately trying to salvage their film from being gobbled up by conventionality but only ending up with an effect that is neither as wonderful as it could have been had it temper its seriousness nor compelling.

As the film failed to weave the genre flawlessly, they succeed choosing Jane Oineza as their leading actor she was able to meet the expectations of the audience. As a matter of fact, she is one of the factors why this film cannot be considered as a trash. Without her compelling the lead, films” horror factor will be much less persuasive. Aside from Jane’s wonderful lead, Maris” natural cute presence and Joey Marquez” clumsy actions and humorously embarrassing attempts really help the film to make their audience engaged on the screen.

It’s really like the resumption of Lily Monterverde’s Shake Rattle & Roll series that the funny part of a horror film will not be missing. As for the Cinematography of the film, the countryside shots and the filter of the scene really had the effect of refreshment, nostalgic and at the same time, spooky. It is not that shocking because R. Sales is the one who is in-charged to it (just what he also achieved in Saving Sally last year) on the other hand, the disappointing Visual effects is not consistent. The designs of the dead bodies may be well edited but not legit, and sometimes the appearance of the “sitsit” was poorly edited same as the sound effects. They might choose other native soundtrack to be more appealing and scary just like the match of the White Lady (2006) by Jeff Tan and a lullaby “Ili-ili”. Overall, you can rate this entry a “not bad at all” film because there are elements that can be reconsider and somehow it deserved its place in the MMFF.