A group of 12 year old girls face a night of horror when the compulsive addiction of an online social media game turns a moment of cyber bullying into a night of insanity.
I have no idea where to start with this review. I usually jot down a bunch of notes while watching a movie so that I don’t forget a point I may want to make later, or perhaps an intelligent quote I liked. In contrast, my notes for this movie were more of a collection of angry blurbs and complaints hammered out on my keyboard like a raging neck-beard. Perhaps it was the abhorrent Candy-Crushesque intro that will probably cause epilepsy in a number of viewers? Perhaps the bizarre, random fisheye lens shots? Why were they used? No idea. Who knows? I’m just…confused?
Accurate reaction to watching opening sequence.
Instead of Facebook posts, tweets, snapchats, instagrams or whatever is trending these days, the editor used some ridiculous 80’s era Street Fighter imagery. It was Blood Dragon meets Mortal Kombat. When the entire premise of the movie revolves around social media, you’d expect something a little more modern. This made me go from somewhat liking the film and enjoying a relatively fresh take on a currently overdone genre, to getting annoyed by the arcade imagery mixed with distorted dubstep and wanting to quit outright.
“I’m not angry…I’m just disappointed”
The writing was also terribly inconsistent. One scene would have meaningful and coherent dialog and then the next nothing but unintelligible dribble. It gave the film a somewhat manic feel. For example, there is a wonderful confession scene with a pretty good monologue that really let’s you connect with the character and understand some of her personal struggle, which is then followed by some random pool scene with absolutely no transition whatsoever. This adds greatly to the disconnect that is pretty much the one constant throughout the film. The character development is strained and pretty weak throughout as well. As a supposed horror movie, nothing horrific happens at all in the first half of the movie sans the three minute intro that leaves more questions than it does answers.
The white, wealthy, entitled teenage girl. Is there anything more terrifying?
The pace finally picks up once the film hits the two thirds mark and all that bad acting and poor story become somewhat bearable…but the flashy editing is still abysmal and nonsensical. As the proverbial shit begins hitting the fan, the score begins annoying the crap out of you; an unbearable, discombobulating, atrocious, mind-numbing series of sound effects and “music.” You may feel that I am hyperbolising here, but I assure you that I am not. Sounds range from creepy choir music to awful chanting; ear-splitting buzzing noises and random slash and scream effects; slow playing music box melodies followed 80’s montage music; wind chimes and creepy whispers …it just never stopped. It was as if some guy was sitting there post production and just decided to add every fucking sound effect available in the “Horror Movie” category. All of them.
My expression for the majority of the movie…
What confused me more that anything else is that when I looked online, there was a lot of of news, controversy and general chattiness about this movie – It had hype! There was shit about cyber-bullying, internet addiction, body shaming etc. Horror movies of this caliber rarely receive anything near the level of publicity I saw for #Horror. I’m pretty sure that this was just an (intelligent) attempt at mopping up some free publicity to boost sales, because the only issue that really needs to be addressed was that goddamn awful sound editing.
In conclusion, you’ll get more scares reading YouTube comments that you will from watching this movie. Here’s a link to YouTube…Go on, I dare you!
