Friend Request (2016)

Friend Request is a horror movie about what happens when you turn down a friend request from a crazy witch on social media.

Director: Simon Verhoeven

Starring: Alycia Debnam-Carey, Connor Paolo

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

If you’ve seen Unfriended, you basically know what you’re gonna get here. It’s one of these ‘college’ movies written by someone who’s whole idea of college was shaped on like, 1990s cheesy sitcoms or whatever. The main characters are all the cool popular kids who have expensive parties, and they post dumb pictures on Facebook of them at the beach, kissing, eating and drinking and smiling!

It’s funny because, while I guess it’s accurate that they’d do this kind of stuff, the writing is bereft of any kind of character or personality. So the whole movie has the effect of being like a bunch of shallow Facebook profiles came to life. That’s pretty funny if it was intentional; but you know it fucking wasn’t.

I'd also like to point out how random the main group is... you've got the one blandly popular white chick, an overweight mixed-race-looking girl, a somewhat fat comedic relief guy, a blonde Karen type girl, and another dude that looks like a stereotype of a 'loner' with a weird haircut and tattoos. It's like a fucking focus group. Make them feel like real people! That might actually lend your movie some humanity.

I guess the story is this girl Laura, basically a wax mannequin that talks, befriends this weird girl with a black hoodie always over her head! The girl, Marina, immediately gets weird as she starts commenting and liking everything Laura posts, sending her strange messages and all that – oh and she has zero other friends. Who the fuck has ZERO other friends? There was nobody else?

It would be easy just to press the ‘block’ button, but don’t tell the movie THAT… instead, they just have Laura unfriending Marina and then going to a big luxurious party that’s about as expensive looking as your average presidential candidate Wall Street fundraiser. Like holy shit. How are we supposed to care about these people? Not really leaning on sympathy here, movie. It’s like this was made by those jackasses that think $170K a year is “middle class.” “Oh, they’re so relatable, they only have TWO pontoon boats!” “You only drink $600 a bottle wine? You fucking pleb!”

But yeah, then the Marina girl kills herself on video after ripping up a picture of Laura! I guess the ghost of Marina posted the suicide video on Laura’s Facebook, too. This causes the police to investigate in the best way possible – by calling Laura into the principal’s office and interrogating her about it. The cops say the video posting thing means she should delete her account, which is the funniest thing in the movie bar none – just the cops officially ordering this college girl to delete her social media. I love that. I'll never write anything that funny.

They also inquire if she knows where Marina's body might be. Isn't that YOUR fucking job, you assholes?

Then all Laura’s friends start to die off. This one guy dies from banging his own head on an elevator wall. Another chick commits suicide in the basement of a hospital – oh, and here you get the requisite Creepy Hospital Scene (TM) that every fucking horror movie has to have, with dark halls and stuff. They all see weird zombie hallucinations and wasps and shit before they die, too. Wasn’t this a movie about a Facebook ghost? Were the writers drinking moonshine the whole time?

There is also this other guy, Kobe, who looks like some kind of weird tattooed drug addict with bad hair. This guy is the stereotypical hacker character who just types in nonsense on any computer and brings up a bunch of technological gibberish and then delivers monologues on how ominous it all is. What a deus ex machina of a character! He also learns about the occult as soon as it’s revealed that Marina is a witch using black magic. Boy, this guy is just a veritable swiss army knife.

Speaking of that, yeah, that’s the origin story for Marina! Her mother was apparently a witch who lived in an orphanage and burned it down – or some bullshit like that. I honestly don’t know. The movie goes through the process of telling us that her pregnant mother, burned to a crisp in the fire, was kept alive just to give birth to her! What a pleasant image for a throwaway back story in a shitty ghost movie!

Then when she was growing up, a bunch of young boys assaulted and attacked her for years. The voice-over says she was doing pretty well against them as it shows them punching her, which is kind of funny. Though apparently later, she had them mutilated or whatever. Good. Fuck those little twerps anyway.

In the real-time again, more of their friends die – including one girl who falls out a window just when Laura and her boyfriend are driving up in the car. Convenient. Nice and snappy. An efficient death... thumbs up on the app rating for the algorithm, for sure.

Oh and I love the gimmick this movie has of showing Laura's declining FB friend count as the ghost posts more things to her account without her consent. It does it even when the fucking camera shows Laura watching her friend in the hospital with broken bones, covered in fucking bandages. Priorities, ladies and gentlemen! Fuck the immense pain. HER FRIEND COUNT IS LOWERING!!!

Then they all have to go to the ruins of this orphanage or whatever, and do you really even care? These dumb ass movies always have the characters going to some erroneous journey to some foreboding looking place. It really just makes the places so much less cool, because now they’re associated with the nonsensical writing and mundane, rote plotting. It’s like the opposite of a travel guide.

One of the only interesting parts of the whole film is when that Kobe guy turns on Laura because the ghost only wants to kill all her friends, not Laura herself. Kobe tries to kill her, thinking it could save his life. This is mildly clever at least, and could have been a kind of subversion from the usual nonsense these movies always have – oh, look, an actual character with a motive that contradicts the protagonist’s! But really I think this was just like a dying gasp of intelligence before the script just goes totally senile; like a brief, painful moment of clarity that something better could have been possible.

I guess Laura then gets killed by the ghost, and the final shot is HER in a weird black hoodie now with a laptop! Implying that the whole thing was actually transferrable. I thought the first girl was just a witch on her own. Now I guess it’s a ghost/possession/transfer sort of thing. I don’t know. I am positive whoever made this just wanted to get it over with to get the money and go save his family from the mafia or whatever.

This movie is just nonsense. The whole thing is all the cliché you ever knew from movies like this, but somehow even more disoriented and droll, like a senile grandpa just wandering in the street. Help this movie get back to its nursing home. It doesn’t need to keep straining itself.

Image copyright its original owners; I don't own it.

The Perfection (2018)

I… uh… you know, I don’t have an intro for this. Just read on and I’ll explain what this is.

Director: Richard Shepard

Starring: Allison Williams, Logan Browning

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This one starts off with a girl named Charlotte, whose mother has died and so she can finally go back to playing the cello like she always wanted. She meets her teacher’s new protege, Lizzie, who has been in the New York Times, so that’s cool. Then through a rapid-fire series of scenes of them playing the cello, they drink together and then have sex and are in a relationship enough to go to China together!

Well, you can say a lot of things about musicians. Apparently they move fucking fast. Charlotte says this is the first time she’s ever had sex, since she spent so much time with her dying mother for years. Well, so far so good. I’m sure this will just be a movie about a romance. How sweet.

In China, the two almost immediately have problems when Lizzie starts getting sick. It quickly begins to escalate when they’re on a bus in the middle of nowhere and Lizzie begins to vomit up worms. She wonders if she has that virus that had been reported in China (… you know, I’m not going there for this), and, no, my friend, what you have is apparently much fucking worse. Vomiting up worms – this is some Exorcist shit.

So, OK. It’s a body-horror flick. Cool.

Then the bus driver kicks them off and they just have to wander around in the middle of the mountains with Lizzie dying. She sees bugs exploding out of her arm and Charlotte then immediately produces a giant meat cleaver out of nowhere and goes “you know what you have to do!” Uh, anyone who carries around a fucking meat cleaver and just pulls it out at the ready is nobody I want to be around.

But then the movie ‘rewinds’ itself in a very weird and stupid manner to SHOW US WHAT REALLY HAPPENED! Apparently, Charlotte actually got some hallucinogenics and slipped them to Lizzie, suggesting subtly that bugs were in her skin. Then she also stole a meat cleaver from a restaurant just for the right time to use. This is some psycho shit, man. The character from Single White Female is going “wow, that’s fucked.” Why’d she have to go all the way to China to do this? How did she know the bus driver would just abandon them? I have so many questions. If they had taken her to a hospital, none of it would’ve worked and the whole plan would’ve been shot. I guess it’s just dumb.

So, OK… now I guess it’s a weird revenge/sociopath type of story! Cool! Are you done trying on different genres of films like it’s a department clothing store? I mean, Jesus Christ, this has more personalities than the homeless guy down the street from me.

Then we flash forward a few weeks to back in America, as Lizzie shows up at the music school like a lost orphan with one hand. The teacher, Anton, immediately shows no regard for her well-being at all and basically kicks her out for losing her hand. What a class act! “You suffered a traumatic injury, now GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT!” This is the kind of guy who grades child cancer patients’ drawings as ‘mediocre at best.’ What a douche!

So instead, she goes and fights Charlotte at her house in the suburbs – wait, so Charlotte’s whole big plan went like:

1. Go trick girl into sleeping with you.
2. Go to China and drug her and make her cut off her own hand!
3. Go home and live in a suburban home and do nothing.

What a plan! She sure is keeping busy these days. I guess it’s good to have a full calendar. That’s the spice of life.

Then Lizzie kidnaps Charlotte and takes her back to the music mansion where Anton the weirdo music teacher just invites them both back in. It’s revealed through some weird flashbacks that, actually, this music school is a weird rape cult where the teacher makes you have sex with him if you mess up the music! What a twist! We also learn that Charlotte was apparently institutionalized before, likely because of the rape cult stuff, and had electroshock therapy.

What a tasteful plot. I’m glad this movie is really shining a light on the plight of sexual assault victims by showing us a bunch of sensational gaudy bullshit twists. Actually it's trash and uses heavy subjects as fodder to be shocking and garish, making it really very immature.

Like this shit is crazy – Anton and his goons, with Lizzie on their side, have Charlotte shackled to a chair and threaten to rape a little girl if she doesn’t do well. What the fuck am I even watching? Who wrote this down and said ‘yeah, makes sense’?

Eventually, we get the OTHER big twist – that Charlotte and Lizzie had actually teamed up to beat Anton, tricking him into thinking HE had the upper hand!

Christ, this movie is full of twists. It’s like three different movies; a romance, a body horror film and then a rape revenge film. I’m not opposed to the genre switching, but the way the movie keeps on throwing twists in and then retconning everything before it makes this a very frustrating viewing. It's not clever if all you're doing is going "oh, yeah, that thing you thought happened? That didn't happen. I'm smart because my mom said so!" Just tell the fucking story!

But yeah – Charlotte and Lizzie team up and kill Anton, eventually severing all his limbs and making him watch them play the cello together. Just imagine clicking on this part as a random point in the movie after seeing the beginning with the two girls kissing and sleeping together. I know that’s not a hard hitting critique, but man is it funny to imagine.

Also, Charlotte apparently did all the stuff about cutting off Lizzie’s hand to save her from the brainwashing of the rape cult thing. I wonder if she EVER just tried talking to Lizzie calmly about it before pulling off that whole scheme. That would be my big problem if I was in Lizzie’s shoes. “Uh, you couldn’t have just talked to me about the brainwashing and the rape cult over our morning coffee? There was no point where you could’ve brought it up civilly? You had to jump straight to CUTTING OFF MY FUCKING HAND???”

But then, that’s our Charlotte – always such a cheeky rascal!

I just wonder why Charlotte had to do everything the way she did. Couldn't she just have killed Anton immediately at the beginning? That would have probably been easier. Or better yet, find some way to expose him or something. So much could've been avoided, including loss of limbs and PTSD-related trauma. But I guess it was more fun to do the whole hand-cutting-off, rape-revenge elaborate plot!

This movie is terribly bad, but I just find it more fascinating than anything. What brain mash thought this crazy shit up? I want to study it under a microscope and find out what secrets lie within. Maybe it could cure cancer.

Image copyright of its original owner; I don't own it.

The Hunt (2020)

Good satire is very hard to do, as this movie proves so well that it ought to be in the dictionary definition for how not to do it.

Director: Craig Zobel

Starring: Betty Gilpin, Hillary Swank

IMDb

You might know this from last fall when Trump and a bunch of other conservative weirdos saw the trailer for this movie and then got mad about that without even waiting to see it! Which, after I’ve now seen it, is hilarious, because it’s basically conservative satire playing right to their base and they didn’t understand it. That makes this at least a little funny.

This thing starts out with the subtlety of a nuclear warhead hitting your house, with a text conversation between a bunch of stereotypical liberal types talking about how they’d love to be at “the Manor” hunting “deplorables” right now. One guy says the president is a “ratfuck” and a lady says what he did “ruined her day.” Oh man, pause it, I need time to digest this mind-bending social commentary. It’s too smart!

Then a bunch of regular-seeming white people with southern and midwestern accents wake up in a field with gags in their mouths. They find a bunch of swords and guns and stuff in a giant box and take them, but this does not seem to help them even a little bit, as their opponents just throw grenades at them. That seems unfair as fuck. It’s like if you agreed to play badminton against someone and, instead, they just fucking threw grenades at you.

I do admit that the way the movie just kills off characters wantonly while implying they’ll be important is pretty funny… that at least adds a charming sort of grindhouse splatter to the whole thing. Too bad that can’t last all movie, since that would be weird and make no sense.

Instead, the REAL plot starts when a bunch of the idiots find a gas station where a mom and pop old people team is at the counter. One dude says he’s from Orlando, FL – the one guy with a basketball jersey and white-dude dreadlocks, of course he’s from my hometown. Fuck you, movie.

The old couple starts spewing a bunch of dialogue about gun rights, and then, after they kill the others – they’re part of the whole thing, oh man! – they get into an argument about whether it’s OK to say “black people” now while cleaning up the bodies. Get it, 'cause they're annoying liberals? The subtlety! It’s burning my eyes! I can’t see anymore and am now having to figure out how to apply for a service animal online!

The main girl turns out to be Betty Gilpin’s character Crystal, who is obviously the lead because she’s the only one not spewing generic conservative stuff about secret societies and libtard cucks and everything. She looks like she is about to cry for the entire film, which made sense after I saw where all this was going. She teams up with Ethan Suplee’s character Gary, who is some kind of Alex Jones style blogger.

There’s one scene where they come across a bunch of illegal immigrants who Gary suspects of being “crisis actors.” Just keep funneling those buzzwords into the script! It’s the cheapest way possible to show how political division is – this shit is like a Facebook comment thread between a bunch of 65 year olds just thrown haphazardly into a blender. Like yeah, just throw in every possible bottom of the barrel cliche. We don't get enough of that in real life. I want to hear about crisis actors and liberal cucks in a movie now, not just in the sewers of the internet. That's good dialogue!

There’s no real characters here for the most part; just strange Frankenstein’s monsters made up of cliches from the most obvious, groan-worthy parts of today's agonizing political discourse. I'm amazed Damon Lindelof wrote this after his quite good take on Watchmen last year. Is it some kind of yin-yang deal? Something about for every good thing you put into the world, there's something negative, too? Dude - you didn't have to do this.

There is some fun violence I guess. Crystal and this old farmer-looking guy get to the compound where all the bad guys are sitting around going “please don’t joke about that” - yes, really. Crystal makes incredibly short work of them all in an entertainingly bloody fashion that I am sure CPAC will make great use of as a ‘let’s get pumped up’ video.

Then we get the big twist that Hillary Swank is in the movie! Happy day! Oh, and also that apparently, the whole plot never existed before conservatives on the internet all started making conspiracy theories about how liberals take conservatives to a big manor and hunt them for sport. So then Swank’s character and the other villains, all high up businesspeople or something, make jokes about it through text and are fired. Then they all decide to make the conspiracy happen for real. They set up an elaborate murder hunt for no reason except that they were accused of it.

The final fight with Swank has her telling Crystal that “you all made it happen.” Which is about as lame of a justification as you can get. “We may have murdered a bunch of people, but you guys posted stuff we didn’t like on the internet.” Well when I think about it for a second, I guess that’s a good justification after all. The internet is life or death and if you can't have a fancy office job, you might as well become a mass murderer. I think that's what Rachel Maddow told me in my dreams.

Oh and also Crystal was apparently not the person they meant to pick for this – there was another lady with her name that they meant to kidnap, and THIS one is a trained badass martial artist. Seems like they should’ve noticed that when she was picking everyone on their side off like they were defenseless babies. But who am I to judge?

I guess the final fight is pretty OK, but how much of it is worth sitting through the rest of this awful steaming shit pile of a movie? I really don’t think it was worth it.

The problem with the twist in this movie is that it doesn’t change all of the stuff from before, which is essentially red meat conservative propaganda – the LIBRULZ are KILLING real AMERICANS! That’s shitty writing. You can argue that it’s all meant to be nonsense and satirical comedy, but the conservative characters, despite some outrageous lines, are shown to be polite, helpful and generally on the same team to help one another when the shit goes down. The liberal elites are just evil cartoons.

It’d actually be fun to lampoon the milquetoast liberals who are all superficial – but this isn’t the way to do it. Even aside from that, the writing is just dumb and dull and everything that happens is just perfunctory to move the plot along. It’s a hollow thing. But have fun paying 20 bucks to rent it on Amazon – what a great investment this has all been for me.

Images copyright of their original owners; I don't own any of them.