{"id":927,"date":"2015-04-24T22:42:46","date_gmt":"2015-04-24T22:42:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/?p=927"},"modified":"2015-04-24T22:45:03","modified_gmt":"2015-04-24T22:45:03","slug":"review-unfriended","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/review-unfriended\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Unfriended"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"unfriended\"Since The Blair Witch Project<\/em><\/a> bored us all to tears and\/or gave us motion sickness, there have been hundreds of \u201cfound footage\u201d horror flicks, most of them unwatchable. Unfriended<\/em>, at least, offers a slight twist on the formula: Instead of constructing the movie around camera footage of some idiots walking around in the woods, the story plays out during a Skype session between some idiots in their bedrooms at home. I went to see it thinking there was at least a chance there\u2019d be some clever use of technology as a means of storytelling. <\/p>\n

Not so much. Once you know the basic premise, you can guess how the story plays out: background is established through Youtube videos and Facebook timelines, private conversations take place via instant messenger, and what little glimpse we get into the main character\u2019s internal monologue plays out through website visits, Google searches, and possibly music selections, though the last one only really tells the audience that she listens to incredibly bland music. There are a couple of instances where computer glitches are used for spooky effect, but otherwise Chrome tab product placement is about as clever as the filmmakers get with the \u201cit all happens on the desktop\u201d premise. <\/p>\n

The story is equally predictable. As you probably know from the previews, a mutual friend of the characters, Laura Barnes, committed suicide a year ago and now her ghost has come back to haunt them online. It\u2019s pretty quickly revealed that the suicide was the result of online shaming. Since I had just finished Jon Ronson\u2019s So You\u2019ve Been Publicly Shamed<\/a> the day before, this kind of piqued my interest, but the film doesn\u2019t really supply any interesting commentary or subtext (this is very much a \u201cjust text\u201d kind of movie). Anyway, Ghost Laura is back for internet-driven revenge. <\/p>\n

Since Laura took herself out after after her darkest secret (that she got drunk and shit herself) was revealed online, she\u2019s getting her revenge by revealing the other characters\u2019 darkest secrets to one another. Which brings us to another problem with the movie: all the secrets are incredibly boring, high-school gossip kind of secrets, in part because the characters are so boring and two-dimensional. The characters are so shallow that only one of them (the geek) is individuated enough to count as a stock teen movie archetype. The others are only slightly more distinct than \u201chigh school girls #1-3\u201d and \u201chigh school boys #1-2.\u201d The format and the decision to tell the story through one desktop (presumably to keep the audience from getting confused about who\u2019s the current POV character) provides some excuse, but it\u2019s a weak one since the Skype conceit allowed them to put actors on the screen. If the movie took place 15 years ago and we only saw the character\u2019s ICQ messages, the flat characters would be a lot more forgivable. This is just weak writing. <\/p>\n

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is not one of those horror movies where creative or spooky carnage makes up for other failures. Apparently, Ghost Laura kills people either by possessing or mind-controlling them into offing themselves with whatever\u2019s lying around, and most of the death scenes use the \u201cyou can only see what the webcam can see\u201d premise to cover for the lack of budget and creativity. There are no spooky ghost effects, no really creative murder weapons, and no Final Destination<\/a> bus-style \u201choly shit\u201d moments. <\/p>\n

Overall, it\u2019s like the filmmakers came up with the hook and then half-assed everything else. The plot is predictable, but that\u2019s not the problem. The premise basically allows for \u201cactual ghost killing people\u201d or \u201crevenge hoax,\u201d and neither would have been unexpected enough to count as a twist. The real problem is that they they told a predictable story badly. The idea of telling a story via computer screen is interesting in theory, but the novelty wears off very quickly. Once that happens, the only thing to hold your interest in is the ever-lessening hope that the filmmakers have another clever idea up their sleeve. They don\u2019t. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since The Blair Witch Project bored us all to tears and\/or gave us motion sickness, there have been hundreds of \u201cfound footage\u201d horror flicks, most of them unwatchable. Unfriended, at least, offers a slight twist on the formula: Instead of constructing the movie around camera footage of some idiots walking around in the woods, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":928,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,37],"tags":[30,29],"class_list":["post-927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture","category-reviews","tag-horror","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=927"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":931,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927\/revisions\/931"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kingyak.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}