We skipped seeing
Unfriended when it hit theaters back in
April, for the simple reason that we thought it looked awful. Sure, it puts an interesting spin on the typical
Hand-Held/POV offering by using the
Internet as its setting, but the whole thing just looked like it was going to be a mess that only teens would react positively to.
And that's basically what it was.
I'm a bit baffled at how so many
Horror Critics raved or even semi-raved about this movie. Personal tastes aside,
Unfriended wasn't a very good
Horror movie. Sure, the demographic that the movie was aimed at probably loved it to the tune of "OMG it was literally the scariest movie ever!" but adults who have seen 100's, and potentially even 1000's of
Horror movies thought their lives? I just don't get it.
Unfriended went on to make
$54 million Worldwide off of a $1 million budget though, so what the hell do I know?
Unfriended is the story or a group of kids who are harassed online by the ghost of their former friend,
Laura Barns, who killed herself after being bullied online. A year after
Laura's suicide,
Blaire, her boyfriend, and a group of their cronies are hanging out on
Skype, having a chat, when a mysterious person named
billie227 joins their group.
bille227 is talking to them through
Laura's old accounts, and knows things about each of them, like deep dark secret things. When she begins to post videos and pictures of them doing horrible and embarrassing things online, they quickly find that they are at her mercy.
So yeah, haunted
Skype.
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| THE BULLY WHO WAS BULLIED TO DEATH. |
Try as they might, they can't get
billie227 to go away, and they find themselves having to play her twisted games or be killed... which happens anyway, so I'm not really sure why they just don't unplug their computers and run like hell. As
billie227/Laura begins to kill them off one by one, they scream into their webcams; call each other names; freak out; juggle communications between multiple people at once via video chat, text, IM, and cellphone; and sit there glued to their screens like idiots. So they pretty much do what most people do when they hang out together nowadays.
Cybernatural terror ensues.
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| PLEASE JUST STOP SCREAMING. |
We have to give
Unfriended points for at least trying something original with the
Found Footage conceit (which in this case, is more of a
Live Footage sort of thing.) The movie also does one hell of a job of marketing itself, as
Skype,
Facebook,
YouTube,
Instagram, and
Chatroutlette are all used liberally to give it a relevant and timely setting. No
Twitter though. Wonder why that is?
Some of the acting was pretty good here too, even if the material the actors was working with wasn't so hot.
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| RENEE OLSTEAD IS A SUPER QT. |
Technology has been used in
Horror to great effect in the past,
One Missed Call and
Pulse being the best examples (and we mean the
J-Horror originals, not the half-assed
American remakes.) Those movies were effective enough that they actually made us wary of computers and cell phones after watching them. At least for a little while.
Unfriended though really isn't very effective or scary at all; oh, it's clever in its mechanics, and so in that way it's fairly effective, but it didn't scare us. Not even a little bit. Unlikable characters probably didn't help matters much, but the whole "we've got to keep chatting or we die!" thing felt silly to us, and that premise barely built up any tension or dread to make us fear what was coming next.
Truth told, the most terrifying part of the movie was trying to come to grips with the idea that teenagers can navigate a desktop with 30 open windows spread across the screen at one time. The teen melodrama was horrific too, but only insofar that we had to endure it for 90 minutes. Are there really groups of kids out there who all get on video chat together and "hang out" online with each other? And are they really that annoying when they do?
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| THAT WAS PRETTY MUCH US WATCHING THIS MOVIE. |
It's really hard to take this movie or its premise seriously. I get that the ghost has basically trapped them at their computers under pain of death, but they honestly do nothing besides sit there waiting to die. If you're screwed like that, it doesn't matter what you do, because whatever is out to get you is going to get you, but come on. The whole movie was basically watching a group of friends chat on
Skype, with a cheap jump-scare thrown in every once in a while to keep things scary.
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| REALLY? THAT'S THE BEST YOU CAN COME UP WITH? |
And as loud as the movie blatantly screams "
Cyber-Bullying is bad!" at the top of its lungs, that message really doesn't ever hit home as being poignant. Maybe that's because all of the kids involved are made out to be one-dimensional jerks, not one of them having any sort of redeemable quality. Even the girl who was bullied to the point of killing herself was made out to be little more than a horrible asshole in life.
A bully is bullied to the point of suicide, and then her ghost comes back to bully the people who bullied her, before killing them. Exactly who are we supposed to have sympathy for here?
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| I KNOW, WE'RE ALMOST DONE RANTING. |
There were a few specific things stood out to us as making no sense.
- Where were the parents of all these kids? They spend the entire movie screaming, having fits, smoking weed, and dying horrible deaths, and no one hears them? Were they all out bowling together or something?
- Again, a "Footage" movie that makes things freeze and go all pixely whenever something "scary" is supposed to be happening. Of course.
- Why did we not see more of the death scenes? As uneventful as this movie was, when something grisly does finally happen, all we get is a quick flash of it, or we only see the aftermath?
- Aside from some of the language, this could have been a Lifetime Movie of The Week. It was far more about teen melodrama and dysfunction between friends than it was Horror.
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| WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON? |
If the goal of this movie was to make us cheer, and even beg, for all of its characters to die painfully, then job well done. When those deaths do come however, they were more laughable than gory.
You'd figure that a movie about a bunch of idiots
Skyping with one another would at least have some boobs or something, but no such luck.
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| THE CYBER-SEX SCENE THAT NEVER WAS. |
So much of the movie is spent staring at chat screens while
Blaire debates what to type, or watching countdowns, or waiting for videos to buffer, that we're not sure what's supposed to be scary about it. I mean, at the point where the movie actually turns into a game of
Never Have I Ever, where everyone is forced to reveal "earth-shattering" secrets about themselves and each other, I asked myself who is actually supposed to enjoy watching this shit?
Then I abruptly realized, teenagers. You know, the demographic that this movie was made for to begin with.
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| STOP WAVING ALREADY, THEY SEE YOU! |
Unfriended is a movie that deserves credit for taking the whole "
Haunted Technology" idea to a new level, at least in a way. It's not scary at all, and at times it was actually laughable, but it took its story in a relatively new direction, and that's at least something.
The bottom line though is this: if you're a kid who spends a lot of time online, then this movie will probably terrify you to no end. If not, then its strong points, and there aren't many, will probably be lost on you, like they were us. In the end, it was just impossible for us to take this movie seriously enough for it to work.
D+
Unfriended is available now on
VOD.
One thing that can not be debated is the fact that
Unfriended features a wealth of
Eye Candy. If you want to see more of
The Ladies of Unfriended, then check out their
Hottie Post HERE.
