Antisocial

Five university friends gather at a house party to ring in the New Year. Unbeknownst to them, an epidemic has erupted outside, causing outbreaks around the world.

Scott Weinberg of Fearnet says, "If you can get past the fact that the flick is composed of 75% recycled ideas and 25% new ones, you may find that something to like." Sounds to me like Weinberg does not understand how the horror genre works -- few movies today have less than 75% recycled ideas. Why gripe about this one?

Indeed, this was an interesting satire and attack on social media. Silly, maybe, and certainly nothing that can be taken too seriously. But not the terrible film critics (especially Rotten Tomatoes) makes it out to be. When compared to the technology-themed "The Den", this is the more mature and accomplished approach to the Internet Age.

Although, perhaps, not to everyone's taste, I decided to observe the end of 2020 with a movie about a New Year's Eve celebration interrupted by a pandemic. A Canadian version released in 2013 of a Brazilian movie, "Antisocial" serves just as well as a dramatization of the end of this horrible year. A plague is made worse by social media and forces people to be antisocial by staying-in-place and refusing entry to their homes by those not already quarantining with them. I could be summarizing the past few months in real life as much as I can the movie with that sentence.

Largely panned by critics, "Antisocial" is admittedly not a good film, but it's became too relevant nowadays for me to dismiss it out of hand. Plus, once one gets past the obnoxious social-media introductions of characters and that every character before the last few minutes of the picture, at least, is entirely annoying, that the acting is suboptimal and the dialogue worse, etc., "Antisocial" is rather entertainingly trashy. I appreciate the consistency that has the requisite horror-film sex scene turned into the making of a sex video to be posted online. I also like the implied pun of a biological virus that is spread through computers and online. The ending is pretty good, too, adding some body horror and apparent zombies to the mix. I'm not sure that I would say this sort of cinematic exposure therapy makes me feel any better about the real-world catastrophe going into 2021, but "Antisocial" was more enjoyable than I thought it'd be, including than I thought it'd be at many points while watching it, for a picture that sums up 2020 too perfectly.

Premise was good but started nonsensically slow for no reason. the breakdown moment was pretty ordinary, you could see that this was going to be an inside type film . ok so needed to be good in suspense but you could see how bad the acting was and you thought why did they choose why did they cast -these awful people who you had no interest in and who are such bad actors and then 10 minutes later you realise that they're just given awful Direction, dialogue and acting instructions. So much potential wasted it's the kind of thing I wish someone else did because they would have done 10 times better 3.5 could have so very easily been 7

I watch a lot of Sci-fi movies and the harsh reviews for this movie surprise me. Sure, it's kinda low budget and totally derivative but it deserves better than a 2 or 3!

Bad social media! Well that's sort of the message. And if you will the central thing the movie is saying is: Get out more, be nice in "real" life. Which is not a bad thing in my book. Unfortunately it does fall into almost every cliché on its way to deliver that message. And while the cliché of the "beautiful" people (on screen) is not something I'd complain about, there are others I do.

The actors are trying their best and there is a sense of urgency and it does have more than a little bit of tension in it. So there is something to the movie other than the general idea, that might hold you to watching it. It's not much, but maybe enough for your viewing pleasure.