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‘UNFRIENDED’ TRAILER REVIEW BY METRO CREW

A group of high school students is chatting on Skype when they get a message from their dead friend Laura, who committed suicide one year ago after someone posted an embarrassing video of her online. Whoever — or whatever — it is wants vengeance for what happened to Laura. We realize the film is trying to update the found-footage genre while tackling the issue of cyberbullying, but we can’t help but think it looks a little gimmicky. Unfriended opens April 17 in wide release. >>

PAIGE: This is a really great narrative conceit: using the framework of social media to tell a story. Or it could be, if they tried a little harder to be at least halfway realistic. Who sets up a group video chat over Skype to discuss concert plans? Nobody. We text each other. That’s what people do.

JAMES: This is the laziest found footage horror flick ever. Now computers get possessed, and slasher victims just stay seated in front of their monitors and scream into the webcam.

NICOLE: I would have much preferred a movie that deals with real fears the Inter-webs evokes. Like serial killers and rapists. I know that’s been done already, but to me, that’s still much more believable and scary.

JAMES: I agree. At first, I thought it was going to be a documentary. Like something about the digital synchronization of life and all its implications. But then the trailer zeroes in on a girl at party and I’m thinking, oh, a found footage horror flick. What’s it going to be? Zombies? Alien invasion? Nope. She just craps her pants. Cue the spooky baseline.

JAIMIE: I also thought the beginning was going to be a documentary and then it just turned into … a joke.

NICOLE: I like how this trailer writes, “A new genre of horror.” Is it, though?

CHRISTINA: I think they’re saying it’s a new genre in terms of using social media, kind of like what Blair Witch did for found footage in general. But yes, probably kind of a stretch to call it a whole new genre.

JAMES: The footage in this trailer was actually effective right up to the point where she pulls a gun on herself. Then it felt tacky and exploitative. And I think it’s because the issue of cyberbullying was just used as a springboard for a cheap, supernatural horror movie.

CHRISTINA: I’m glad we just missed this whole cyberbul-lying thing. I mean, there was social media when I was in high school, but it seems really within the past few years that kids have just been doing awful things to each other with it, like in the Steubenville case.

JAIMIE: I think the part that makes me angry the most is that people are doing things like this — killing themselves over things people have posted over the Internet. And instead, this movie is choosing to take a scenario like that and turn it into the “next” big type of horror movie. That is the real horror — why Hollywood, WHY. 


PAIGE: But imagine sinister Snapchat messages. Your front door. Your hallway. And you know you’re getting them in real time because that’s how Snapchat is. Then you get a photo of your pet dog, with a hand you don’t recognize scratching his ears. You hear your dog whimper suddenly, in the quiet of your house, then silence. Then, you get a Snap of your bedroom door …