Unfriended

In a nutshell teenagers are the worst, and social media enables them to be even more evil and banal than a fully grown person could possibly imagine.  And ghosts.

The set up for this shitty ‘horror’ that somehow got a cinema release, is that a bunch of teenagers are doing a Skype when they realise there’s a mysterious stranger online with them.  Oooooh!  Who is it?  Why won’t they identify themselves?  Why can’t the irritating-as-shit teens hang up on them?  Who the frig gives a flying shit?  These are the questions we ask ourselves… thank god for alcohol, because I’m not sure I could go through with this without it.

POTENTIAL SPOILER:  so, it turns out that  Skype kids were awful to a girl at school who died, so, online revenge.  END SPOILER.

So, blah blah blah and then the kids obviously start getting picked off one by one by an unforeseen force, one who has a grudge against them for a specific reason.  And who, as per tradition, will feed the kids information on a piecemeal basis, until they finally understand why they’re being targeted, and who is after them.  The fresh new approach irritating gimmick they use in Unfriended is to have the whole thing play out on a computer screen, so it’s like you’re one of the Skyping teens, yeah?

I’ll admit I found this novel at first but after about 43 seconds I got bored.  And annoyed.  And a bit confused.  I mean, with the multiple windows, and the direct messages, and web searches all happening on screen at the same time, I wasn’t really sure where to look.  And to be honest, for such a boring, shitty film, I kind of resent being made to make that much effort.

Score : 2/10

If you’re interested in horrible teenagers being subjected to revenge plots, I’d recommend you  check out the far superior TV movie Cyberbully, starring GoTs’ Maisie Williams.