Review of Slender Man (2018) by The3Academysins — 15 Aug 2018

Slender Man fails at being a horror movie, but it unintentionally may be the laugh-out-loud comedy of the year. Where to begin? I guess we can start with the acting. You know how there's that horror movie cliche where the characters wearing the least amount of clothes die at the beginning, but the surviving characters lose more and more clothing as the movie goes on? Well, Slender Man is like that, but if the acting got worse as the movie goes on. I mean, there is some intense scenery chewing from our leading ladies. To put it bluntly, the script is a lazy mess. It doesn't follow it's own rules for how Slender Man behaves. Characters say and do random things that are never brought up again (like the main character being on the track team, which is never ever used by the story). Some scenes read like an emo highschool girl's BDSM fantasy. Several scenes rip off of Marble Hornets very poorly. There are several "dream-within-a-dream" scenes that are laughable at best and boring at worst. In fact, that's a good analogy for this whole movie. Half of the movie is hilarious and the other half put me to sleep!

Now for Slender Man himself. Sometimes he looks like a bloke wearing a tube sock on his head. Other times he looks absolutely T H I C C. Like, this guy has some hips that just don't quit. He's not very slender at all! Also, some of his effects look like the crew for Birdemic came in and did the CGI. There's a shot of him standing in the woods in broad daylight with UNFINISHED tentacle renders floating behind him. Also, there's a chase scene at the very end of the movie that looked like a PS1 era cutscene. It was so cringey it was a riot.

The soundtrack is the only saving grace of this film. Ramin Djwadi did the music, and there are some good horror vibes and ambient noises. The end credit music is easily the best music in the film, although that may have been colored by how happy I was for Slender Man to finally be over. This is a GREAT bad movie to watch with friends. If you actually like being scared, just don't.