Smiley: Il Nuovo Volto Della Paura

Yeah, so I watched 2012's Smiley last night.

It's a piece of crap with a stupid plot, a stupid attempt at a "twist"… and I'm sure some freakin' hipster will defend it as the direction of the new "Artcore" movement.

Just because you call a piece of crap a rose, doesn't make it a rose.

So, a girl starts college, and her partying new dorm mate invites her to a party. Once there she's introduced to "Smiley" – You get in an Internet chat room with someone, and while you are there, you type "I did it for the lulz" three times, and magically something bad happens to the person on the other side of the chat window. Not a terrible idea for a horror movie, but unfortunately, it is a terrible horror movie. I'm not even 100% sure where it went off the track, but it was one of those movies where you just end up waiting for it to end.

There are movies out there like "Savage Weekend" and "Fat Crazy Ethel II" that are worse to sit through than this movie, but those have such low production quality they can't even be called actual movies. Smiley, however, is an actual movie, and by that standard, it's easily the worst slasher movie ever made. It's also the worst horror movie ever made. In fact, I even consider it one of the ten worst movies of all time.

Smiley is a movie made by and starring a bunch of internet celebrities I'm only vaguely aware of. A self-indulgent passion project, this movie was created purely to kick start all of their film careers.

Smiley is part of a depressingly skyrocketing trend of "Social Media"-themed horror movies. Other entries in this sub genre include the abominable "Megan is Missing" and "Unfriended." A movie that is easily the best of the three, but is still a 4/10 film.

Smiley revolves around a boring, lifeless protagonist I can't even remember the name of as she finds herself caught up in the seedy underground world of "Trolling." Here, evil internet trolls go to "The Bee board on Four-Chan" and "hack severs to post CP" and other inane nonsense. I'm not kidding, the dialogue is really like that.

This movie relies very heavily on internet references, and the creators saw it fit to have characters explain what all of the terminology and lingo means in really blunt, obvious, patronizing expository dialogue. So if you ever wanted to know what "Anonymous" and "Lulz" are, now you can! Of course you don't actually exist because no one with a proper amount of chromosomes cares about any of this.

Of course, being a movie about the evils of 4chan, Smiley puts a lot of stock into the phrase "I did it for the Lulz!" being haunting. Since the movie uses it over and over and over again. In fact one of the characters even gets a long-winded speech out of nowhere about how it represents nihilism and sociopathy and how it's extremely terrifying as the camera closes up on his pudgy face and smug grin with cinematography and lighting so cartoonish it feels like he's about to morph into a lizard or something.

But "I did it for the lulz" is not scary. It's not haunting. It's not even unintentionally comedic. It's stupid. It's a stupid phrase with bad grammar and a made up word. It's the type of thing that can only work on the internet ten years ago. It's like trying to make "lol" sound scary. It just isn't, and no amount of spooky low-voiced monologues or turning down the lights will ever make it scary.

It's hard to talk about this movie with using the word "cringe" a lot. It's the best way to describe the way you'll react to most of the dialogue and plot points: cringe. It doesn't matter if you know about "internet culture" or not. Whether you're a tech-savvy teenager or an old grandma, you'll be sighing, groaning, and cringing your way through this film until it's merciful credit sequence.

It's impossible to care about any of the characters. The ones that aren't complete blank slates or soulless exposition machines are extremely ridiculous strawmen with lines so over-the-top they should be saying them while tying girls to train tracks. This movie attempts to tackle the casual nihilism of internet communities and gets everything completely wrong.

I'd really hate to say it, but "Unfriended" took a lot of the concepts this movie attempts and did them far better. Using internet bullying and "trolling" as concepts for a horror movie is a stupid idea, but at least Unfriended was competent enough to make it's terrible characters seem like real people (terrible people, but real enough) and to avoid exposition about dumb internet crap nobody cares about.

Oh, and Smiley, the movie's killer? He gets about four minutes of screen time, and three of those aren't really him. I won't spoil anything but the twist pretty much invalidates the entire film and comes out of nowhere.

For some reason, Keith David makes an absolutely humiliating cameo in this and you can't help but feel sorry for him. I expected more dignity from the guy who played Coraline's cat.

If I had to use one word to describe this movie, it'd be "embarrassing." Even if you watch it alone it embarrasses you. It's a huge embarrassment for the entire cast and crew. I don't even like these guys, but nobody deserves to be a part of a piece of garbage like this.

They deserve better, and so do you. Don't watch this movie. It's insulting to your intelligence.

The concept of this film is a joke. Jason Voorhees killed because of the carelessness of his camp counselors letting him drown, Michael Myers killed because of his repressed childhood and the psychological effects it had on him, and these douchebags killed... to be the first "viral killer"... Did they even read these ideas out loud!?! How could they not realize how stupid this was?

Giving this movie 1 star is an insult to all 1 star movies, this movie deserves maybe just maybe 1/1000th of a bronze star... at very best!

The acting is atrocious too, there's a reason Shane Dawson never made it any further than youtube, because he's a horrible actor! The characters aren't memorable, it's flawed in MANY ways, and I'd go on but unfortunately I'm limited to 1000 words so that is all for IMDb, now for a rant to put up on youtube.

After watching the trailer and hearing about the cast i had high hopes for this movie. I was excited and couldn't wait, but who knew what kind of disappointment awaited me, after watching the first five minutes you cold clearly see that casting a bunch of untrained Youtube stars wasn't a good choice. Unfourtunally the forced tension couldn't make up for it, the script didn't deliver anything interesting and the obvious twists were pretty easy to predict. Smiley himself had like five minutes of screen time which was even more disappointing and the gore moments were just silly which made them actually hard to watch. This movie lives from the online communities it exploits to help hype the film.

The nerd Ashley (Caitlin Gerard) moves to the apartment of Proxy (Melanie Papalia) near the campus of her college. On the arrival, Proxy invites Ashley to smoke pot and to go to a party, where she meets students with nicknames. Further she learns about an urban legend of the serial-killer Smiley, who comes through the Internet and kills persons that write three times "I did it for the lulz". Soon Ashley witnesses a murder in her monitor and that event triggers paranoia in Ashley that is bipolar. She believes that Smiley is hunting her down but nobody believes in her. Is Ashley mentally disturbed?

"Smiley" is an awfully ridiculous slasher with an absurd plot, bad acting and stupid dialogs. Ashley is a nerd, but her lines are among the worst I have ever seen. She repeats like a moronic child that "now she can do because she is in college" and she smokes grass and drinks boozes despite of her treatment for the psychological problem. The plot is so unbelievable that irritates. I hope that the last scene in the very end does not mean a hook for a sequel. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "A Face da Morte" ("The Face of the Death")