Unfriended (Also known as Cybernatural) (2015)Starring: Shelley Hennig, Courtney Halverson, Renee Oldstead, Heather SossamanRelease Date: April 17, 2015Rating: 2.5/5
Summary: A group of friends join a Skype call and things turn sinister once an account named 'Billie227' joins their call. What they first believe is a mere glitch turns out to be much more once they start receiving threatening messages from a fellow classmate who committed suicide exactly one year ago.
My Thoughts: Teenagers are complete idiots. Not only am I ashamed to be apart of this generation, I am disappointed that I believed I would actually enjoy this movie. Found footage horror films have been big these past few years and have now gotten to the point where they're plain annoying because we've seen just about everything that can be done from them, however, when I saw the trailer for Unfriended, I was interested because of the way it is shot. It's not apart of the found footage genre because it's told from the screen share option of Skype, so basically it's told from the POV of our main character, Blaire's computer. That was the main reason I saw the movie and it did this well. Very well, actually.
BUT...There is another reason I really wanted to see this film and that it the turnout. I wanted to see if it took the paranormal way or the murder-mystery-teen-whodunnit-horror way and I'm just going to say that it took the spooky, ghostly way and that left me disappointed because I haven't seen a good campy horror film in a while. It's paranormal this, and ghostly that and boo-hoo, "I'm a ghost seeking revenge on some nonsense" that. I just wanted to see something different. I wanted to see some teenager tormenting each of their friends for some sick reason or another that we would find out at the end. But, alas, I was given this.
Not only was I disappointed in this and also the fact that we weren't notified if it was a ghost or not until basically the end of the movie, but the anti-cyberbullying message it was trying to display was not done well. Unfriended is a horror film with not much depth to it, so it having this "deeeep" underlying message wasn't helping it at all because it seemed to make itself to be a bigger deal than it actually was. It's a very teenage-y movie and it's made to appeal to teens, so I can see why when we're bouncing from Blaire's Facebook to her iMessages with her boyfriend to her Spotify account filled with a bunch of appropriately placed hipster music. I was rolling my eyes at every aspect of the way the teens talked, the way they typed, so basically the whole movie annoyed me, but the thing is, that's how teenagers now-a-days are. I am a teen, so I see it 24/7 at school, at the library and the mall, so that's another thing done very well on their part. It just annoyed me, but that's a personal thing because the teenagers who act like this annoy me. So, I along with anyone above the age of 25, would probably walk out of the theater because of these characters. But like I said, it's the differences in age that separates the people who would actually enjoy this film and those who would hate it. That, and taste. Some people enjoy crappy, campy horror flicks like this and I am one of them, even though it is very sad to say. Also, who the hell came up with the name Cybernatural because whoever did needs to pay someone else to name their movies because...What...The...FUCK?