Unfriended Review

Did you hear that noise?

It's the sound of me slamming down the final nail in the found footage sub-genre coffin. I can't do it. I can't take it anymore. I lost the will to keep an open mind and hope for the best with this nonsense at some point while watching Unfriended. I can't quite put my finger on when it happened, but I felt the part of me that wants to see everything and judge cinema fairly die inside. 

Perhaps it was at some point during the first 35 minutes in which NOTHING HAPPENED. It's literally watching teenagers Skype with each other for over a half hour. These piece of shit, awful teenagers sitting at their computers talking to each other. I can barely Skype with a beloved family member for five minutes before getting bored and wanting to do something else. If I wanted to watch a young girl type on her computer and yell at her friends...I can't even come up with a way to finish that thought. I wouldn't ever want to watch that. Why would anyone want to watch that?

At least we eventually get some comic relief when the one kid jams his own hand in a blender. I needed that laugh.

Here's a thought/question: the fact that these children are sitting at their computers talking rather than being together at one of their homes or drinking in a park or smoking weed in a car would imply that they had to be home rather than be out. Hell, the one girl says at some point that she has a test the next day. So that would allow me to form an educated guess that perhaps at least one of these scruffy looking nerfherders had their parents in the general vicinity, correct? Like, I know one of them could have been home alone, maybe even two or three, but all of them? The odds of that seem troubling.

Okay, so that leads me to the overall point: where are these parents? A bunch of teenagers crying, screaming, waving guns around, making flesh milkshakes, crying more, screaming more, waving the gun around again, yelling at each other in anger, sitting in darkness as the spooky ghost of bullied past messes with the circuit breaker, screaming again, crying again and so on...and not once does a parent come upstairs and say, I don't know, knock it the fuck off? When I was growing up, if I farted too loud my dad would tell me to keep it down and get to sleep. 

The characters are awful. The horror is laughable. Also, I have read people refer to Unfriended as an "interesting statement against bullying". This is an interesting statement against bullying? Listen, if someone is a bully, watching this shit storm isn't going to change that. What, you think Chad the football star who steals lunch money is going to walk out of the cinema after 75 minutes of gun waiving, hand blending fun and suddenly see the light? They are going to wake up the next morning and look themselves in the mirror and declare, I shouldn't be a bully anymore? I might get haunted by Skype demons?

Ridiculous. You know what a good statement against bullying is? Teaching your damn kids not to be a piece of shit. Showing them the way to treat people. Instilling positive values and being a good role model to them when their minds are flourishing and they are absorbing every lesson they can from the people around them. My kid won't be a bully and you know why? Because if she even tries to treat a peer as if they are somehow lesser I will smack her in the back of the damn head and say, what the hell is wrong with you? Didn't I teach you better?

Or, she can watch a terrible found footage horror film and fear the dreaded right hand fruit smoothie. That'll learn her.

I want to personally thank director Leo Gabriadze for making Unfriended. Some have said they admire the attempt to reinvent and pump some new life into the found footage craze. Sure, I guess I can say that I do give a small amount of credit for trying something different, that is totally fair, but that's not the reason I am expressing my gratitude.

Thank you Leo for finally putting found footage out of its misery. Good riddance.

1/5