Review of #Horror (2015) by Kenny N — 07 Jun 2016

As I said in my review of "Jennifer's Body," I appreciate any horror film written and directed by women ABOUT women. I think it's a badly needed shot in the arm for a genre that is unfortunately associated more with guys in masks hacking up horny teenagers than as a platform to play with the mind, quicken the heartbeat, and shred the nerves. We've seen it all before. In fact, the young girls who populate this story have "seen it all before": they live for social media, selfies, hits, likes, pokes, Tweets, everything that the experts say is causing the gradual decay of American society. Bullying others and getting bullied back is an everyday occurrence, like the weather. You talk $#!+ about another girl, your friends laugh, the other girl bites back, HER friends laugh, at the end of the day, it's all good fun. Now if you haven't fully experienced what it's like to be swimming in the piranha filled social media channel, this whole film will be utterly indecipherable to you. (Back when I was a youngster 9 years ago, there was widespread MySpace bullying. I was a victim. It was not fun.) The girls who have gathered at the uberpopular filthy rich girl Sofia Cox's mansion for a slumber party are no strangers to this. They never let go of their phones. The mood is constantly jerking back and forth between good natured and jovial to bitchy and hurtful. One of the girls, Cat White, goes beyond the acceptable boundaries of the group and is banished from the party, forced to walk home in the freezing Connecticut woods while her phone fills up with cyberbullies coming together and trashing her on the Facebook/Twitter hybrid site this movie uses. And things start to go downhill from there.

I applaud this movie's ambitions about saying something about cyberbullying. But I must say that the efforts to combine # with horror doesn't work even once. The horror doesn't come until much later, before which we spend time with some annoying, obnoxious, borderline COMPLETELY unlikable girls who seem to act more 21 than 12. I wouldn't want to be trapped in a house and forced to listen to these rotten brats jabber on and on and be bitchy to one another. But the movie forces us to anyway. Intercut are scenes with the adults of the film, mostly two of the girls' parents, spouting inane, disjointed dialogue that sounds like it came from another script. The film then transforms into a coming of age saga where the prepubescent ladies discuss periods and kissing boys before turning into a home invasion thriller featuring Timothy Hutton (I thought he couldn't be any more ridiculous and over the top than he was in "The Temp," yet here we are.) And as it finally spirals downward to it's conclusion, plotlines smash into each other like a 10 car pileup on the freeway. And once it's over, that's EXACTLY what it looks like.

Once again, I eagerly await the day we get a top notch horror tale envisioned by and for women that isn't all about final girls and slutty victims. "Jennifer's Body" wasn't it. This is not it either. Too much #, not enough horror, and nothing else really worth watching. #SkipThis.