ridiculous rating

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

At Yamanashi International University in Japan, Maiko is struggling with her mother's suicide two months earlier in the 'suicide forest'. Amber leads a class project with Kyle and Terry to look for her body. Ghostly apparitions start appearing in the background. They see two policemen carry out a body. Cameras are not allowed. Lone hiker Jin warns them and offers to guide them to the supposed site. Three classmates play a prank on them.It's strange to shot in BC with a bunch of white young adults and call it Japan. Kaitlyn Leeb is at most half-Asian. I'm sure they could have picked one Asian as part of the group. Some of them are definitely cannon fodder anyways. It's great to have a solid actor like Hiro Kanagawa but it's not enough. The ghosts don't count. There are way too many idiotic dudes acting idiotically. This is a no-budget horror that starts with minor creepiness and then turns into overblown horror shlock.

Set in a suicide forest in Japan (but filmed in Canada), it is the location that elevates this film beyond the ordinary. It looks wonderful, eerie, beautiful and is effectively lit.The characters unadvisedly exploring the forest are a fairly likable bunch of teens (which isn't always the case) – there are the 'nice' kids (Maiko, Kyle, Terry and Amber) and there are the 'idiots' (Craig, Brody and Skylar - who think it's a good joke to pretend to be a hanging corpse) – but as it turns out, the 'idiots' are more entertaining than their more saintly counterparts, especially as Maiko is, sadly, the least interesting of them all. Inexplicable, gory deaths and imaginative set-pieces abound.The storyline doesn't appear to make any sense other than our group of young friends are all victims of 'a curse'. At one time it seems as if the police are involved, but events ensure they are as much victims of the curse as anyone. And yet, as the final reel reveals, they are at least in league with the evil. The confusion starts to become enjoyable toward the end, as if there is a dangerous chaos on display, but the film ends before this takes a satisfactory hold.

Setting off into Aokigahara Forest, a teen and her friends' mission to put to rest her lingering fears of her mother's death put them into danger when the restless spirits of the dead around them take out their anger on the group for their attitudes toward them and must find a way of stopping them.This here turned out to be quite an entertaining and enjoyable effort that gets a lot of great points about it. One of the better elements here is the use of the local custom that plays such a central part of the storyline that it really starts to feel as though the events could happen to play out as they do. Being that this is Japanese the culture and heritage of honoring one's deceased echoes throughout this one in so many ways that the great pride it places on the subject earns the eventual rampage from the ghosts later on once the mocking had been committed. It's all completely justified and rational, and that makes the ghostly actions all the more fun with several incredibly chilling gags, from simply transporting you to a different dimensional plane of reality without realizing it in order to prevent their friends from finding them in time to prevent your death, vanishing behind trees, rocks or landscape changes to avoid detection, putting your own thoughts against you and making you do something against your will or just flat- out attacking you with their ghostly powers in vicious, brutal attacks. By doing this in such a chilling and creepy location, almost seemingly filmed at the real forest itself as the attention to minute features of the area makes for an absolutely chilling, creepy area to remain the entire time, and offers up plenty of suspense from the landscape itself. With a fast pace that keeps things moving along briskly, a couple of brutal and quite bloody deaths dished out, a real sense of danger when it comes to the treatment of the cast since they're all in the firing line at some point and not too many flaws here, this is a spectacular, stand-out effort.Rated R: Graphic Violence and Language.

You would think that with all of the commercials that were advertising the upcoming viewing of this show that it would have been much better that what it was.From the beginning to the end was nothing but a slow and boring journey of a bunch of friends filming in the forest trying to capture ghosts. The main character talks of her dead mother, who is portrayed in flashbacks as being Japanese and of her childhood with her mother. However, as a child, she is portrayed as a Japanese child but the main character looks more Hispanic than Japanese! There is nothing remotely scary about this film and it was definitely over-hyped. Don't bother unless you just absolutely have nothing else to do.