After a humiliating drunken video surfaces online Laura Barnes is bullied relentlessly by her peers until she takes her own life with a gun. One year later a group of 5 friends are skyping together when an online presence claiming to be Laura joins their conversation and begins terrorizing them. From here Unfriended follows the basic slasher formula of picking off teenagers one at a time in reverse order of likeability. Ken, the fat kid with the Hawaiian shirt whom they presumably keep around for comedy relief, dies first. Before exacting deadly revenge against her enemies, Laura’s ghost exposes their dirty teenage secrets and succeeds at playing them against each other. The lessons are quite obvious: 1) Any picture or video taken of you can come back to bite you in the ass and 2) Teenagers are filthy, cruel, backstabbing monsters who need to be monitored at all times.
It’s a fairly enjoyable and creative take on the modern found footage horror movie but I did become mildly irritated by the format. The whole movie takes place on a computer screen and while that does open up new possibilities, it also means that the viewer is subjected to clicking, typing, IM’ing, buffering, downloading, deleting and refreshing pages for an hour and a half. It wears a bit thin but the story is compelling enough to make you need to know how it all ends up.
10 comments:
Never heard of this one but you're right teenagers are filthy, cruel, backstabbing monsters who need to be monitored at all times. I think that mostly applies to the girls.
And I love that on my phone it's Gretchen's face that shows up as the main image for the post.
I might add that I also thought at first that Gretchen was unfriending us.
Noooo! We didn't mean it Gretchen!
I was intrigued by the trailer for this but I feel like that format would drive me nuts.
I also remember thinking this liked interesting. Might give it a go. I also got the Gretchen head icon!
*looked
Stupid phone.
I'm certainly a fan of bullies getting punished but otherwise this sounds skippable.
It does seem like a movie made for millennials and whatever the hell they're going to call this next generation that are currently teens. I'm still curious about this one, if just for the social media usage and relevance of cyberbullying.
Your review is the perfect summation of Unfriended. It is definitely geared towards Millennials. My one gripe is that computers in movies always work perfectly. Just once I want a character to say, "Damnit, I'm getting the spinning pinwheel" like my computer does every day.
I saw this when it came out (if that counts). Here was my silly review (what I imagine the pitch to make the flick sounded like):
WRITER: Awww, come on. It's a new concept. And addresses the today's teens' worst nightmares. Like a teen modern day "Blair Witch Project." If that sacred people, anyways. Don't tell me that doesn't scare the sh$@ out of you...
DIRECTOR: Hm? What? Sorry. Multitasking. Um, yeah. We'll do it all from the perspective of the user. It's our target audience, anyways.
PRODUCER: True dat. For the screen-savvy, and screen addicted, it'll work. Scare those teens enough to make 'em drop their phones their palms are so sweaty. But laughable.
DIRECTOR: Hm? Come again? Oh, yeah. Teen drama. All over it. Sweaty palms.
PRODUCER: So should we...I don't know, electronically traumatize them? You know, into internet-permanence and cyber-bullying awareness? (Yelling at teens) Hey! Guys! Shut off the dam camera phones! This is a private meeting!
TEENS: (laughing hysterically and running off yelling) Shut up, Producer!
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