Friend Request

Today's horror was Friend Request, a horror movie focused on the pitfalls of the social media age. I spent 45 minutes of this waiting for the whole split screen, told-through-message-and-video-chat-windows-thing to happen. It finally took looking it up to realize that this was not indeed Unfriended, but rather, the incredibly similarly named Friend Request. Well, color me stupid.

Anyway... I'm kind of surprised to day that I didn't hate this movie? Like, I feel like I totally should have hated it, but somehow I didn't. Don't get me wrong, this definitely isn't good by any stretch, but for the teen horror movie genre, this is pretty run of the mill.  

Friend Request shows it's generic nature in every respect. The plot centers around a loner girl who gets befriended by the main character out of pity and begins to stalk her. She eventually kills herself over being rejected and begins to kill each of the main character's friends through their social media accounts. There's some convoluted explanation for why she can kill through the computer that's really dumb and there's lots of screaming teens as they're being pursued by spooky dead things. Etcetera etcetera.

Yeah, so ultimately this movie is just predictable as hell, everything unoriginal and uninspired. It's not bad per se, just... bland. Like I can't even effectively make fun of it, because it's not bad enough to be ridiculous. Which is tough for me, because no vehicle for all my snark. Damn.

I do have a theory, though: no one who has made a movie about college has ever actually been to college. Somehow everyone has immaculately adorned apartments, is rich, and white, except for one or two people. Accurate.

5/10