Caught the latest horror flick Friend Request which is not the same as the movie Unfriended though you would be forgiven for confusing them by name. But this is a more traditional flick than Unfriended… even if both are warning us against the evil demons and witches what live in Facebook or Facebook-like programs. But I’m sure we’re all aware of those evils, right?!?!
Anyhow, in Friend Request, the first 30 minutes are surprisingly good. If this were a 45 minute short film, it’d have come off well, but it has another hour to fill and it just falls apart with massive generic scares and not enough story to fill the time.
So the opening scenes of the film are about a popular college student (she has 800+ Facebook friends!) who reaches out to a shy new student who has no friends (0 Facebook friends). The new girl turns out to be an unstable, clingy stalker and quickly tries to take over her Facebook page with comments and clingy comments. This was a pretty tense and ominous set of scenes that gave me hope for the movie.
But, alas, the girl kills herself after the main character unfriends her. Now, as a ghost, the lonely girl can possess yo facebook account and post horrible videos and You. Cannot. Delete. Them!!! And. You. Cannot. Delete. Your. Account! And all your friends now think you are a creep and start Unfriending You!!! This flick has a literal ticking clock as we see her friend count plummet.
At first blush, a film about a literal ghost hacker is dumb in the same way any ghost can take over your phone or a video tape or whatever is dumb. Death gives you amazing electric and/or hacker skills, right?! But this flick does make an effort of justifying it… the girl is secretly a witch who conducts a black mirror ritual using the reflecting screen of her laptop as the mirror. Sure, it borrows from the title and theme of the show Black Mirror, but I guess, hey, fair enough.
The scares in the movie waver between a general sense of dread (that slowly fades as the movie keeps going) and a few too many jump scares. To the film’s credit, some of those jump scares actually worked on me and I don’t usually react to them at all. But the final thirty minutes of the film can do nothing to save this film from falling apart as it drags on and on.
I started thinking I was gonna recommend the film despite it’s very low Rotten Tomatoes score. I thought maybe I’d found a flick that was being unfairly picked on. But, no, they are ultimately right… the movie falls apart as it goes. It’s really unfortunate.
Score: 68