Formula: That One Episode of Modern Family * I Know What You Did Last Summer
Cast: As works best with most found footage movies, I didn't recognize anyone in the cast. Ok, I knew Renee Olstead from back in her Still Standing days but she's nearly unrecognizable (puberty will do that). The gimmick of the movie masks a lot of the acting. Any of the actors could be giving Oscar-worthy performances (they weren't) and it would've been hard to tell through the webcams. I think there's a girl from Teen Wolf (Shelley Hennig) who is the most likely draw here. She's essentially the lead (it's her computer we see) and she's fine throughout. Again, no one is going to impress you.
Plot: Six friends in high school get on a video chat one night. A year ago, that day, a classmate committed suicide after an embarrassing video of her was posted online. They have varying levels of involvement in what went down before her death. There's a mysterious person in the chat who they can't get rid of, signed into the account of the dead classmate. You've seen a horror movie before, so you know the rest. Ghosts. Revenge. Reveals. Death. The story assumes that just because the characters are on screen though that we're supposed to care about them. That's problematic. The movie doesn't give me a reason to care about any of the characters. It also fails to make them awful enough to root for their demise. They're just characters on the screen and I'm not even sure why the spirit of the dead girl [oops...spoiler alert?] is going after more than two or three of them.
Elephant in the Room: 80 minutes on a computer monitor? I'm going to use the word 'gimmick' a lot because that's what the movie is. A different way to look at it is it's an experiment. Whatever word you use for it, the goal was to tell a story through a computer screen. That's a tough thing to do and they do it as well as could be reasonably hoped. The main girl, Blaire (whose computer we're watching) moves between Facebook, video chats, web searches, and all that in a way that seems natural enough and drives the story. The main drawback is that the director relies too heavily on the same tricks. Specifically, the webcams cut out or lag at especially tense moments too much. A few times is fine, but it leans on that same trick every time it needs something to be scary. There's also the limitation of needing to follow everything on the screen. Unlike subtitles, there's things to read all over the screen and more than once, I missed some valuable information because they didn't keep it on the screen long enough to notice it. The gimmick of the movie is a hard one to pull off.
Movie Theater LVP (Least Valuable Patron): The guy who made comments to his girlfriend at normal volume throughout the movie? Yeah, you know all those people who started clearing their throats after you started talking? That wasn't an accident.
To Sum Things Up:
This needs to have one of two things: good writing or good direction. It either needs to be populated with characters that I'm invested in with a smart story or it needs to be told in a visual way that keeps me at the edge of my seat and scared (preferably more as the movie continues). Ideally, it would have both, but at least one is needed to bolster the other. This lacked either. It was at times fun and in the beginning, there's a real tension to it that had me wondering what kind of craziness I was about to see. The scares stopped being effective when they got lazy with the tricks and I never developed a reason to care about the characters. This movie fell short of being anything other than another disposable horror movie.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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