"Japanese folklore tells of a practice called ubasute—literally "abandoning an old woman"—in which villagers would carry their elderly and burdensome relatives to the peak of a mountain or some other similarly desolate place and leave them there to die ... In the film business, ubasute is an all-too-real phenomenon, and it happens in full view of the public. Every year, during the first proper weekend of January, the studios’ niche labels trot out the horror movies they know have nothing to contribute to society and leave them for dead in your local multiplex, hoping that the release might make life simpler by turning a tidy profit and easing the company balance sheets.All of this is to say that anybody with access to a calendar already knows that The Forest is bad; at this point, that's less of a presumption than it is a tradition. The only question worth asking about an early January horror movie is if its inevitable badness is at all interesting."