Ethan Allister (Jason Tobias) and his son are out hunting in the snowbound forest when something begins to hunt them instead, such is the way the world is right now since a deadly pathogen has got into society and infected the majority of the population. It turns them into ravening maniacs who will stop at nothing to kill anyone in their path, and if they don't kill you, they will infect you, preferably with a bite, so obviously Ethan and the boy, Josh (Danny Ruiz) do not want to get too close to this victim. He has other ideas, however, and despite being shot with arrows manages to get the man in a dangerous position that he only just gets away from, though not without being chomped. Now he has to get his son back to his wife Joe (Marci Miller), who has her own problems...
Forget Everything and Run, also simply known as F.E.A.R., was one of those genre flicks where you may find yourself identifying the influences as you watched, the main one being the popular zombie television series The Walking Dead, especially those episodes where the living villains espoused their twisted philosophy and either you or the heroic characters were supposed to think, I hate to say this, but they have a point! Human beings do resort to their worst instincts under tremendous pressure, and they do need a lot of control if the race in general is to prosper. If you were irked by how many times this trope would occur, then you were not going to get along with this little item, since it was revolving around that premise, only on a fraction of that show's impressive budget.
Therefore if you were anticipating an abundance of extras going "rargh!" and lunging towards the good guys and bad guys alike in a bloodthirsty horde, well, that is not exactly what was on offer here, as there was that one bloke at the beginning and a selection of friends of the directors to look like a smattering of the crazed infected at the end, but in the middle it was the uninfected who posed the biggest risk to survival. That was, with one exception, as Marci and Ethan had a teenage daughter, Mia (Cece Kelly), who was upstairs in a bedroom in their wilderness hideaway and going into convulsions if she did not receive a dosage of an anecdote to the pathogen. Therefore we had a twin-pronged attack on the nuclear family, either the infection would bump them off or the loquacious survivalists who insisted on interrupting the Allisters for their own selfish motives.
On the subject of influences, there was a dash of 28 Days Later... about this in the rage virus plotline, but married to the family focus of A Quiet Place, with attending sentimentality, particularly in the latter stages when the reality of what has hit them is intended to land. Directors Geoff Reisner and Tobias (he also penned the screenplay) did muster a selection of pretty decent action and suspense sequences considering their slender means, and were assisted by a cast who may not have been too familiar, but proved they had the chops when it came to acting. Most notable was Susan Moore Harmon (wife of Robert Harmon, director of The Hitcher back in the eighties) who took what could have been a very hackneyed character of self-justifying evil and made something almost three-dimensional out of her: if The Walking Dead or its spin-offs were looking for a memorable bad girl, she would have been ideal. If you did not wholly get on board with the would-be heartstring-tugging come the last act, this was by no means the worst of the survivalist genre, no matter how often you would be thinking of other, bigger productions as it unfolded. Music by Alex Kovacs.
[Signature Entertainment presents Forget Everything And Run on Digital Platforms 26th April 2021.]
