FORSAKEN

Director: J.S.Cardone

Starring: Kerr Smith, Brendan Fehr, Izabella Miko, Phina Oruche, Simon Rex

Helpfully subtitled Desert Vampires on the sleeve, Forsaken is a Near Dark-style feral vampire movie, apparently created solely to give the young stars of a couple of Warner Brothers TV shows (Brendan Fehr from Roswell, Kerr Smith from Dawson’s Creek) something to do on their summer hiatus. Phina Oruche (who played Olivia in the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV series) also appears, as one of the nomadic vampires encountered by Smith and his new vampire hunter chum Fehr. 

There’s nothing at all remarkable or innovative about the film, but dedicated fang fans will still want to check it out. There’s been a half-assed attempt to present the disc as a special edition, but it’s been undermined by Columbia’s decision to shoehorn everything onto a single layer disc: the two extremely short featurettes, the three short deleted scenes and the three trailers (one each for The Forsaken, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Hollow Man) are noticeably over-compressed, although the film itself generally looks okay. The transfer is 2.35:1 anamorphic. The audio is Dolby Digital 5.1 (at 448kbps). An uninspired commentary track completes the specialness.