Director: Simon Verhoeven
Starring: Alycia Debnam-Carey, Connor Paolo
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.
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