OK as we are officially in fall we are about to get into the serious horror movie glut of the year. So here we have another teen demo horror movie this one based on the horrors of social media. The movie, Friend Request stars Alycia Debnam-Carey (Fear the Walking Dead) as Laura Woodson the most popular girl on this college campus who has over eight hundred Facebook friends (like that is a lot) and has this TV commercial-like lifestyle. Being the most perfect and popular girl on campus means when she meets the goth-like Merina Mills who no one hangs with she, of course, decides to accept her friend request on Facebook, like how can that hurt right? Well, Merina spams her with messages, hits her up for video chats and just wants to instantly inject herself as Laura’s bestest friend in her life. Overwhelmed Laura asks her friends what she should do when Marina wants to come to her birthday party? They tell her to just cut this chick off. She decides to let her down easy and lie to her face about who’s going to be at the party but then ruins it BY POSTING THE WHOLE PARTY ON FACEBOOK. Bruh. Where do they do that at? Marina confronts her in front of everyone cool in the college cafeteria and Laura ends the friendship and (gasps!) unfriends Marina. From there Marina does something terrible and spoiler ends up causing weird happenings to Laura’s Facebook which causes everyone to hate her and all her close friends start killing themselves. Laura spends the movie trying to stop it.
There’s more to all this; like Marina being a Facebook witch...yeah you read that right. This whole movie feels out of touch almost like this movie would fit better six to seven years ago. I say that because these days college kids are on Instagram and Snapchat. That sounds nitpicky but it makes it feel like some old person thought this up and said this is what the kids would think is cool. Let us show them just how dangerous social media is and the effects that it can have by having a bunch of annoying and uncaring white kids get killed through their phones by a girl who becomes a killer social media ghost. Let’s do this with the most boring shot selection possible with the most muted and boring looking photography. Let’s have the sound cue for the monster be that static we all used to get on the phone when a cell was being used before iPhones were out.
All the performances were over the top yet underplayed the whole time. Alycia has done much better work on Fear the Walking Dead. The movie also decides that it must have two threats at the end so it’s not enough to just have a Facebook killer ghost it had to add a killer, thirsty ex-boyfriend. I don’t know why they chose to second guess their decisions 65 minutes into the movie. This is so far the worst movie I’ve seen all year. More than Wish Upon and somehow worse than Transformers: The Last Knight but this has achieved it. So hooray for them but please stay away from this. Just go watch like 90 minutes of Facebook videos.
Rating: 1 out of 5
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