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Unfriended:
(This review will be spoiler heavy. If you're interested in this film and you haven't already seen it, it's on iTunes now. If you're not, just read along and have more fun than watching the movie.)
Unfriended is another entry in a long line of Blumhouse horror movies made for less than a million dollars that was sold on a gimmick. I could say that, but I think it would be unfair to the film. There's a long and convoluted origin to the creation of Unfriended. In 2013, Blumhouse productions created a film called Cybernatural. It was about 95 minutes long, featured 7 characters in a Skype chat getting picked off by a ghost, Adam got offed by a car, and the audio of the Skype chat was at full volume during the entire movie. Cybernatural premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival in 2014, and was picked up by Universal to distribution. Universal changed the title to Unfriended, cut the movie to 83 minutes, featured 6 characters in a Skype chat (Hard not to feel bad for Matthew Bohrer, who is still credited as cast in most published reviews but does not appear in the movie), made Adam get offed by a gun, and drained the audio of the Skype chat every time our main character, Blaire, went to text somebody. If you watch the trailer directly before or after watching the movie, you can tell that more than half of the shots are taken from Cybernatural and didn't translate to Unfreinded. Cybernatural received very positive reviews at the festival, while Unfriended received mixed reviews. I think that most of the studio's changes were for the worse. I haven't actually seen Cybernatural, but it sounds like it was a significantly better movie than Unfriended.
My biggest problem would not change in either version, and that is that every character is irredeemably unlikable. That might be the point, but that doesn't make it any less annoying to sit through. There is a set of high school character archetypes: the generic but relatable protagonist, the nerd, the slut, the cool jock, the black kid, the fat one, etc. These tropes are annoying no matter what, but if they can work it's because they balance each other out. 4 of the 6 characters in this movie are the vapid slut that cannot carry an intelligent conversation if their life depended on it, which it does. They do nothing but talk about sex and parties and having sex at parties and it's draining to listen to because a majority of the cast has this limited scope of life experience. I wish the main character was Mitch, the main character's boyfriend. He was the closest to likable, which still doesn't mean I actually like him, but seeing as he was a mildly nice person that has computer knowledge and first typed the ghost theory, this film was basically about him already except that every dead teenager movie these days needs to star a female.
The true nature of just how annoying and unbearable these characters are comes from a game of Never Have I Ever, an unpleasant 15 minute segment where absolutely nothing happens except for teenagers yelling at each other for sleeping/drugging their best friend/boyfriend. This film had some momentum going up to that point, and the worst thing I can say about the first 40 minutes is that it was kind of boring and littered with continuity errors. Not to rant in the middle, but the continuity is just awful. The timestamps on texts get changed every time the window opens up, and some messages disappear only to reappear (Never disappearing is the tab at the top of your television screen for star Shelly Hennig's MTV series Teen Wolf). The Never Have I Ever segment kills off Adam, but more importantly it kills off any enjoyment that I was getting out of the film. It goes out of it's way to be obnoxious, which it does far too well for its own good.
The scares in the film are mostly jump scares, but at least they have a build up and tension, except for the last one. It gives the scares poor payoff, but it would be too harsh to call it poor horror. There are a few good, creepy moments in here. My favorite was the death of Val, the vain slut that the other vain sluts come to a consensus of hating. You see her face frozen with a bottle of bleach in the background and her dogs barking. You assume, like the characters, that the audio is picking up but not the visuals. When somebody calls her, you hear the phone ring, and then see it vibrate across the table into the shot. That's how you build atmosphere. I really wanted to give this movie credit, because that is a level of horror construction that no found footage movie goes to. Unfortunately, Val then falls to the ground in a jump scare and I realize that I won't miss Val in the slightest.
The last jump scare, and by far the worst, was one that completely breaks the logic that the film had going. Blaire is the last person standing, and it's revealed that she was the one who shot the video of Laura Barnes (the girl that becomes the ghost) that caused her to commit suicide. The video, with her face in front of the camera, is uploaded to Facebook, and a bunch of people comment that Blaire is a horrible person and that she killed Laura. Laura's profile sends her a message that says "Now you have to live with this." Boom. Perfect. End the movie. The ghost got her ultimate revenge. A person who kills themselves does it because death is preferable to life. In Laura's case, dying was better than being bullied. Horror formula says that Blaire should die, but in a tragic and yet ironic twist, Laura forces her to live the way she did because it's the most cruel ending possible. It's smart and deep, more thoughtful than it had any business being. I would give it a pass if it ended here. It was flawed, definitely, but it didn't suck too bad. Of course, the movie doesn't end. *JUMP SCARE MUSIC*, the laptop shuts, Blaire screams, a few seconds of pause, *JUMP SCARE MUSIC*, the ghost comes out from behind her and kills her. It's a bad ending for being cliched, cheap, and not scary, but it's especially awful because it directly contradicts one of the best horror endings ever. They had a chance to make an interesting and poetic statement about bullying and high school suicides, something really powerful that delves into the psyche of bullying victims, something to grab the attention of its audience and intelligently push their moral, and they piss it away for slasher tropes.
Missed opportunities are the name of the game for Unfriended. It's essentially an unoriginal and unpleasant dead teenager slasher film that dates itself immediately, dressed up in an original gimmick, but it came close to being really original. Something like The Gallows is embarrassingly unambitious, but this is almost worse because people flirted with the idea of being clever and then decided against it because conforming to horror cliches is profitable. It made over 30 times its budget and is getting a sequel in 2016, so they weren't wrong, but it would have been nice to not waste potential and artistic integrity in the process. Realistically this is a 2/5 in quality, but I feel a need to knock it down a peg because a few small and easy fixes could have made it really good.
Unfriended:
(This review will be spoiler heavy. If you're interested in this film and you haven't already seen it, it's on iTunes now. If you're not, just read along and have more fun than watching the movie.)
Unfriended is another entry in a long line of Blumhouse horror movies made for less than a million dollars that was sold on a gimmick. I could say that, but I think it would be unfair to the film. There's a long and convoluted origin to the creation of Unfriended. In 2013, Blumhouse productions created a film called Cybernatural. It was about 95 minutes long, featured 7 characters in a Skype chat getting picked off by a ghost, Adam got offed by a car, and the audio of the Skype chat was at full volume during the entire movie. Cybernatural premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival in 2014, and was picked up by Universal to distribution. Universal changed the title to Unfriended, cut the movie to 83 minutes, featured 6 characters in a Skype chat (Hard not to feel bad for Matthew Bohrer, who is still credited as cast in most published reviews but does not appear in the movie), made Adam get offed by a gun, and drained the audio of the Skype chat every time our main character, Blaire, went to text somebody. If you watch the trailer directly before or after watching the movie, you can tell that more than half of the shots are taken from Cybernatural and didn't translate to Unfreinded. Cybernatural received very positive reviews at the festival, while Unfriended received mixed reviews. I think that most of the studio's changes were for the worse. I haven't actually seen Cybernatural, but it sounds like it was a significantly better movie than Unfriended.
My biggest problem would not change in either version, and that is that every character is irredeemably unlikable. That might be the point, but that doesn't make it any less annoying to sit through. There is a set of high school character archetypes: the generic but relatable protagonist, the nerd, the slut, the cool jock, the black kid, the fat one, etc. These tropes are annoying no matter what, but if they can work it's because they balance each other out. 4 of the 6 characters in this movie are the vapid slut that cannot carry an intelligent conversation if their life depended on it, which it does. They do nothing but talk about sex and parties and having sex at parties and it's draining to listen to because a majority of the cast has this limited scope of life experience. I wish the main character was Mitch, the main character's boyfriend. He was the closest to likable, which still doesn't mean I actually like him, but seeing as he was a mildly nice person that has computer knowledge and first typed the ghost theory, this film was basically about him already except that every dead teenager movie these days needs to star a female.
The true nature of just how annoying and unbearable these characters are comes from a game of Never Have I Ever, an unpleasant 15 minute segment where absolutely nothing happens except for teenagers yelling at each other for sleeping/drugging their best friend/boyfriend. This film had some momentum going up to that point, and the worst thing I can say about the first 40 minutes is that it was kind of boring and littered with continuity errors. Not to rant in the middle, but the continuity is just awful. The timestamps on texts get changed every time the window opens up, and some messages disappear only to reappear (Never disappearing is the tab at the top of your television screen for star Shelly Hennig's MTV series Teen Wolf). The Never Have I Ever segment kills off Adam, but more importantly it kills off any enjoyment that I was getting out of the film. It goes out of it's way to be obnoxious, which it does far too well for its own good.
The scares in the film are mostly jump scares, but at least they have a build up and tension, except for the last one. It gives the scares poor payoff, but it would be too harsh to call it poor horror. There are a few good, creepy moments in here. My favorite was the death of Val, the vain slut that the other vain sluts come to a consensus of hating. You see her face frozen with a bottle of bleach in the background and her dogs barking. You assume, like the characters, that the audio is picking up but not the visuals. When somebody calls her, you hear the phone ring, and then see it vibrate across the table into the shot. That's how you build atmosphere. I really wanted to give this movie credit, because that is a level of horror construction that no found footage movie goes to. Unfortunately, Val then falls to the ground in a jump scare and I realize that I won't miss Val in the slightest.
The last jump scare, and by far the worst, was one that completely breaks the logic that the film had going. Blaire is the last person standing, and it's revealed that she was the one who shot the video of Laura Barnes (the girl that becomes the ghost) that caused her to commit suicide. The video, with her face in front of the camera, is uploaded to Facebook, and a bunch of people comment that Blaire is a horrible person and that she killed Laura. Laura's profile sends her a message that says "Now you have to live with this." Boom. Perfect. End the movie. The ghost got her ultimate revenge. A person who kills themselves does it because death is preferable to life. In Laura's case, dying was better than being bullied. Horror formula says that Blaire should die, but in a tragic and yet ironic twist, Laura forces her to live the way she did because it's the most cruel ending possible. It's smart and deep, more thoughtful than it had any business being. I would give it a pass if it ended here. It was flawed, definitely, but it didn't suck too bad. Of course, the movie doesn't end. *JUMP SCARE MUSIC*, the laptop shuts, Blaire screams, a few seconds of pause, *JUMP SCARE MUSIC*, the ghost comes out from behind her and kills her. It's a bad ending for being cliched, cheap, and not scary, but it's especially awful because it directly contradicts one of the best horror endings ever. They had a chance to make an interesting and poetic statement about bullying and high school suicides, something really powerful that delves into the psyche of bullying victims, something to grab the attention of its audience and intelligently push their moral, and they piss it away for slasher tropes.
Missed opportunities are the name of the game for Unfriended. It's essentially an unoriginal and unpleasant dead teenager slasher film that dates itself immediately, dressed up in an original gimmick, but it came close to being really original. Something like The Gallows is embarrassingly unambitious, but this is almost worse because people flirted with the idea of being clever and then decided against it because conforming to horror cliches is profitable. It made over 30 times its budget and is getting a sequel in 2016, so they weren't wrong, but it would have been nice to not waste potential and artistic integrity in the process. Realistically this is a 2/5 in quality, but I feel a need to knock it down a peg because a few small and easy fixes could have made it really good.