Unfriended movie review- by Your Movie Sucks (YMS)

Full-text transcript of the Unfriended movie review:

[00:00:08] Unfriended is a shitty movie, and with so many people saying that it wasn’t all that bad, I thought I’d offer my perspective on this pile of garbage unfriended as a movie that fails on every level. The acting was terrible. The character’s actions were unrealistic. And most importantly, it wasn’t scary and it was fucking boring. If I wanted to watch an idiot gawking at a computer screen with their mouth open, I would just turn on my webcam. All right. So the movie starts off with our main character, Blair, watching a video of Laura Barnes’s suicide. And for some reason, she decides to hold the gun at arm’s length. Why? She then watches the video that apparently forced Laura Barnes to kill herself. How nobody was bothered by the terrible acting here is beyond me. To me, convincingly obnoxious is not the same as being convincingly drunk. Now, some people praise this movie for using real websites like Live and YouTube. I mean, we all remember how stupid it can look if you just make things up.

[00:01:05] Click stars. Hello.

[00:01:07] But if you’re going for realism, then you might want to do a little bit more research on how these things usually play out. So you’re telling me that this is the video responsible for a young, attractive white girl shooting herself in the weirdest way possible and it only has like seventy five thousand views. And more unrealistically, her suicide video hasn’t even broken 1500 after a year. Not only that, but how the fuck is this on YouTube anyway? One of the most strictly enforced policies on YouTube is for bullying and harassment of video like this. Telling someone to kill themselves wouldn’t get very far before getting flagged and removed, as evidenced by the fact that the video you uploaded to accompany this movie got flagged and removed. Seriously, the video didn’t even make it to a thousand views before that happened. As of right now, it’s back online because it’s just a fake, stupid thing for a movie. But isn’t it kind of funny how quickly the movie was able to delegitimize its own plot? So now Blair and her boyfriend Mitch decide to bluebottle each other over Skype. At this point, it becomes excruciatingly obvious just how little self-awareness the script has. The entire opening of this movie is filled with as many attempted ominous fake scares as possible. One or two of these might be all right for creepy foreshadowing, but they kind of fucking overkilled it. First, we got Blair using her demon voice. I got

[00:02:17] Something to show you

[00:02:19] To your demon voice again. Then we got Mitch saying he’d die for her.

[00:02:23] Easy. That’s for that

[00:02:25] Type for you. Then you got Mitch threatening her with a knife to make you think for a second that he’s possessed or something.

[00:02:29] Take this shirt off before I cut it.

[00:02:33] That’s really violent. And then as soon as everybody else enters the call, we get this line

[00:02:38] Dirty girl, you’re going to hell. Now, what were you guys doing? Going to hell with the rest of us.

[00:02:43] I mean, I’m all for subtle foreshadowing, but I don’t see any subtlety here. When you’re forcing as much of it as you possibly can into a very short amount of time, it only comes off as exactly that forced like. Did you seriously need the fat kid to pick up the blender and show it off for the audience? You made it very clear from the trailer that he’ll be using this to kill himself later. But it’s almost as if they forced the shit and just so they could explain why he has a blender on his computer desk. But they didn’t realize that leaving that out would not only make this seem a lot less forced, but it would actually make a lot more sense to OK, so the way this works is Laura Barnes’s ghost possesses you and makes you kill yourself with this particular character. His webcam disconnects for about 30 seconds before coming back on. Could the ghost not have just possessed him to go to the kitchen and bring back a blender within that thirty seconds? You might say that sounds a little stupid, but it’s not any more stupid than apparently being possessed to adjust the angle of your webcam during the moments while it’s offline. Like, I can’t watch this scene without imagining Ken just fiddling with the webcam during that black screen. Let me angle this just right so they can see me destroy my hand. He even decided to move the webcam closer while his hand was in the blender. If we can accept that shit, that we can accept that he’d have a blender in his house without needing it to be shown off to us. It’s like in Birdman how they felt the need to show the character driving to work and filling up his gas, as if to imply that we needed some kind of explanation to show how exactly he got to work and, oh, how classic that their solution to the problem actually makes things worse,

[00:04:04] Thanks to the society.

[00:04:08] Like, isn’t it a little bit more unreasonable that he would be preparing all those vegetables at his computer desk? You brought a separate bowl to pour it into what the fuck are you doing, preparing it at your computer desk? But nope, if he gets killed by it later, he has to show it off. Otherwise, people will wonder why he has a common household item in his household killed by a knife. You got to show it killed by a hair straightener. You got to show it. Where you doing this? Just for the video call, because it’s like nine p.m. on a Monday. No, she can’t just step outside her bedroom and grab some bleach. It would make so much more sense if she just had this entire Skype conversation in her laundry room. Showing the gun before it’s used is totally fine, even though the presentation for this movie seemed a little excessive. As for every single other suicide item, it was nothing but unbearably forced into the movies. This obnoxiously transparent, it makes it a little bit difficult to get into the story. Oh, yeah, this movie actually has a story. Let’s get back to it. So now they notice that somebody in the call that they didn’t invite, they tried kicking them out, but it doesn’t work. So they decide to hang up and try again. Now, Blair and Mitch are chatting like, how could they have entered our call without one? All of us answering it and then not even 10 seconds go by without much typing, but apparently this is enough for her to start nagging him like crazy, holy shit, just calm down and let them pass. We’re not that far into the movie, but already our main character is pretty fucking unlikable. Is he not allowed to leave for ten fucking seconds? So then they try again, but the guy is still there, so they hang up again. So now we get more slow, quiet, boring messages between her and Mitch.

[00:05:38] It sounds like a very suspenseful movie. It is, that is the key word. It’s not like most horror films in that over the past five

[00:05:49] Minutes are not scary. Like you’re watching this kids escape after school.

[00:05:54] I just believe it or not, it’s not. That sounds boring.

[00:06:01] Now, she gets a message on Facebook from the account of the dead girl who shot herself in the head at arm’s length.

[00:06:06] I don’t know if you know this, but we did a thousand reshoots. The death scene happened probably seven times in seven different ways.

[00:06:14] This then prompts her to delete the Laura Barnes video from her Chrom history while simultaneously not deleting it from her YouTube history. I’m not saying it’s unrealistic that she didn’t know that her YouTube account keeps a history of all the videos she’s watched. But there are quite a few moments in this movie where I find myself getting a little annoyed because the main character doesn’t know how to computer. So we’re almost 15 minutes through the movie and barely anything has happened. They log back on and oh man, the accounts are still there. We then learn that it’s the anniversary of Laura’s suicide, which was on April 12th, 2013, meaning it’s now April 12th, 2014, meaning that this attractive middle class white girl hasn’t had any Facebook conversations for four months. I’m willing to accept that a ghost can possess your computer, but that right there is too much to ask. Meanwhile, we can’t hear her friends anymore for some reason. There’s far too many points in this movie where it seems as though they expect you to be unable to read something if someone’s talking in the background, if the ghost is constantly turning their volume down, then you’d think that the main character would say something. You know, if we actually saw her muting applications just to achieve this effect, that would actually be pretty cool. But unfortunately, they didn’t give a shit. I’d almost like to believe she has some sort of program running that automatically turns down the volume of applications in the background. But there’s at least one scene where the volume doesn’t turn down, making it really inconsistent and distracting, which kind of defeats the purpose of doing it in the first place.

[00:07:42] This isn’t funny

[00:07:43] Anymore. When your movie has found footage style and you want people to believe that what they’re seeing is actually happening, then why the fuck would you go out of your way to present the movie in a way that can only be achieved in post-production? Oh, wait, I get it. If everything stays really, really quiet, it anticipates people for jump scares that may or may not happen here. I’ll do it right now. Well, I actually like my audience, so I won’t jump scare you guys, but do you see how easy it is to manipulate people through

[00:08:44] Who got scared? You scared?

[00:08:51] Now, there are some pretty great horror movies that have used that sense of anticipation appropriately, but when it’s pretty much all your movie has to offer, mixed with the fact that you’re sacrificing logic and realism to achieve the effect, then it only comes off as manipulative, distracting and stupid. When you’re not falling for it. It’s really fucking boring.

[00:09:26] A lot of people are going, oh, see, I’m I’m. I saw the feeling like there was like so

[00:09:31] Crazy, like it looks like a really kind of scary movie, you really get you, you know, very intense. I think that’s a really good way to describe it.

[00:09:39] So during all of this silence, Mitch sends her a link to some shitty website that suggests that people can get possessed by dead people. She then decides to memorialize Laura’s Facebook account so that whoever is using it will stop trolling them while she’s typing things into Google. That same link shows up her Facebook, then starts to have some issues. Oh, are you trying to wait? No. If you if you hit your keyboard, stop. If you just hit your keyboard, command a on your you can select all. What are you doing. Stop it. He tries to unfriend Laura, but it won’t let her. Jesus Christ. Calm down. Oh OK. I just had to refresh it. Oops. Oh hey. Now we can hear her friends again for some reason.

[00:10:13] Go home. Stop looking up. You are you. Hey, I’m writing an email.

[00:10:21] No, never mind. She’s going to open up Facebook again and they’re all going to be mysteriously silent. Am I the only one that thinks that things are scarier? If they’re more realistic, stop with this cheap bullshit. So then they add value to the call. Nobody likes her. That’s her character.

[00:10:53] Can I just be honest? I don’t like them. No, I just to be honest, I don’t like the only person that like is how about how about you tell us a little bit about your character in this movie and play about. And you know, she’s a high school student. She’s kind of friends with this whole group of kids, but she’s the friend like you don’t want there. She’s the one you for a little too long. She’s a little bit catty between

[00:11:20] A fun person and a bunch of really embarrassing photos of, well, get posted to Facebook from Jess’s account. And Jess says she didn’t post them. So now we get to watch this annoying exchange.

[00:11:30] I don’t know why you’re getting high and trashy little

[00:11:33] Bitch to leave. Just takes the photos down, but then they get uploaded again from Adam’s account. So then we got to watch this annoying exchange where it seems as though Val flubbed her line.

[00:11:42] Let’s Blair, you’re just going to take justice.

[00:11:45] Not if you want to believe that it was the character making that mistake and not the actor, then that’s totally fine. But something about the way that she reacts to her own mistake makes it seem a little unintentional. She kind of breaks character for a second and nervously scratches her face.

[00:11:58] Let’s out of you’re just going to

[00:12:00] Take us inside. So I should probably tell you guys about how this film was made contrary to popular belief. No, it’s not real life. Basically, this whole movie was filmed in one house with each character in a separate room talking to a GoPro. The film was shot by having the actors perform the film. All in one take, all in one take, you say, well, that sounds pretty impressive. Is this the Victoria of Skype horror movies? Well, that’s what you might think. If you’re the type of person that only reads the titles of articles without actually looking into the know, the movie we see is not made up of one take. Basically, instead of interrupting actors between short takes, they had them run through the movie from start to finish several times. I mean, why not when they’re each only being filmed from one angle? Because unlike most movies, this is one where they can just literally read through the script as they’re filming. It doesn’t sound nearly as impressive now, does it? You know, in a

[00:12:47] Way, it’s like the way you wish you could direct every everything.

[00:12:51] I mean, not only can you get a shit ton of footage from each full day of filming, but the way that the movie set up, it makes it so ridiculously easy to be able to get the best take from each actor in each scene. Every time a window opens in front of the Skype call, you can sneak in a new take every time one of their webcams glitches, you can cut to a new take. And this movie has the freedom to add in those glitches whenever the fuck it wants. It doesn’t even need to be super obvious. You can just hold the last frame and pretend like it’s lagging. And despite that, somehow they managed to make some of the most annoyingly obvious cuts in the world. How come nobody noticed that Val suddenly learned how to teleport? How come nobody noticed that Adam suddenly learned how to teleport? How come nobody noticed that Blair suddenly learned how to teleport? I mean, at least here they managed to cut to a shot of Mitch while she moves across the room. But apparently they decided it would be best if she does it while she’s typing non-stop. She’s just good at multitasking. You have a million fucking options and excuses to be able to mask these appropriately. So it’s kind of fucking insulting when you go that, oh, they won’t notice route. Instead, if this was constructed more cleverly to fix these easily avoidable annoyances, then I too might be on the this is a technical marvel and achievement train so early.

[00:14:00] Gosh, this film is just ending filmmaking marvel the unique

[00:14:05] Way that it should and the unique way that it can portray feel without really seeing that much at first. Like just from just having someone believe that you don’t know who is that. We had to basically invent a new language of storytelling, and that was something we had to discover.

[00:14:22] It’s probably the first time that I’ve watched a movie and felt like I was actually inside the main character’s head. When you’re watching Blair type. Watching her think you’re watching everything unfold and it’s never been done before.

[00:14:33] Wow, how groundbreaking that they filmed this movie in the easiest way possible. People are basically praising this movie for giving itself training wheels. You have infinitely more control over what the final product of this film looks like than nearly any movie in existence. And it’s still turned out like shit. Based on how this movie was filmed and presented, we should theoretically have the best performed movie of the decade, but instead we got this great.

[00:15:00] Ok, call me trashy. Are you there? Jeff, who is doing this? Let’s be clear. You’re just going to take us inside.

[00:15:08] It’s like people are judging this movie as a concept without even considering the final product as a filming concept. I kind of like it having the actors film the entire movie in one take while also being able to stitch together the very best performances from each scene. Just try and imagine how perfect of a movie you could construct with the right actors and director. It’s a great concept and it’s fucking wasted. Does anybody remember that marketing campaign for L.A. Noire? They hyped the whole game up as though it was supposed to be the pinnacle of performance and acting because of its motion scan technology?

[00:15:39] That’s one of the strengths of our system. We can actually see noticeable features that animation, traditional ones just can’t do. A big theme of this game is dishonesty and to detect when people are lying. You couldn’t have done

[00:15:52] That in the past, but then they hired really shitty actors and gave them terrible direction. All right. Now, when you respond to the detective, act as though you’re lying.

[00:15:59] Where exactly is Black Hold-Up didin? I think he took off for Seattle. This story is a detective story, so the believability of the access performance is key to getting the level of detail is just so high that they just like to be a person in life. Having this realism really helps you literally talking to that person and then see how they behave.

[00:16:24] Unfriended is just as much of a wasted filming concept. The efforts you’re supposedly making for realism mean jack shit if you hire terrible actors and don’t know how to direct them. So now the mystery account admits to being the master troll.

[00:16:36] You said it was just a glitch. Well, the glitch just tight.

[00:16:42] I like how apparently this is the first time that any one of them has clicked on the accounts profile. This is

[00:16:47] Laura’s

[00:16:47] Account. Wouldn’t it have made sense for any one of you to have done that a lot earlier? Because your buddy once again, cheap, dramatic effect prevails over logic? Oh, hey, apparently you can hear them talking while they’re in the background now. Are you sure? Not for long, though, because apparently they either get muted again or I’ll just decide to stop talking to each other and stare into their computer screens like fucking idiots. What the fuck are you doing? Excuse me, weren’t we just talking about how weird it is that Laura’s account is messaging us? Is this a universe where people don’t get extremely uncomfortable when they silently stare at each other for long periods of time? Are you all just silently waiting for Blair to stop typing because you think it’s polite?

[00:17:29] It’s probably just like a troll or something.

[00:17:32] What does a troll?

[00:17:34] Yeah, these are totally young people, guys. What is a troll? Wow.

[00:17:38] Spillett Listen, sweetheart, you’re a fucking asshole and you don’t take these down right now. I’ll come over there. Not the trash out of your ears. You know what? Suck my nonexisting suck. Just suck it, get AIDS and die. You know what this is? Just talk to you about reality magazines. Get a paper cut in your fucking dick and then I hope the bitch falls off. OK, I’ll pop a Glock in your mouth and make a slushy stop fucking around. Everyone hands up right now.

[00:18:15] You tell me I’m not

[00:18:19] Good for nothing

[00:18:21] But my life. You’re saying you’re never late, but still I waited with my.