Pedido de Amizade

I was quite looking forward to this movie, having seen the trailer, I thought it looked promising. It started well enough, with Laura (Alycia Debnam-Carey) meeting Marina (Liesl Ahlers), who is new at the school, feeling a bit sorry for her and seeing that Marina has no Facebook friends, Laura accepts her friend request. It is quickly apparent that Marina is a bit strange and is practically stalking Laura. Laura decides to unfriend Marina and that's when thing's take a turn for the worse. It's here that the movie turns a bit flat and is pretty much like any other run of the mill horror. A few predictable jumps here and there and thats about it. Liesl Ahlers is perfectly cast as 'the creepy girl' but we have all seen this movie before and it offers nothing fresh at all.

Yeah it was jump scares ~ but they worked on me. People say this has been done before. I suppose using social media as the plot point, sure, but this was pretty well done. I was scared. The light's on in my room! Seriously, though, it wasn't completely predictably. That was good. Here's the thing for me, that makes a movie more complete. The dialogue when the story isn't being pushed. The writers and actors don't try to shove personalities down your throat in the down time. The banter was actually funny. The conversations kept things moving. I though it woulad go one way and it went another. Pretty good movie. And to think I almost didn't watch it because of all these wanna be critics.

We were looking for a movie to watch that night and we couldn't find nothing. I finally stopped on this one, expecting it to be a kind of "so bad it's good" horror film or for the least, something we could have fun of… It turned out that it was actually not bad at all. Sure, that's not the horror movie of the year, but I still found some satisfaction watching it. The actors are good, the direction also. There's a kind of thrill at the beginning, but at some point it becomes very predictable. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by that movie, and it didn't turned out to be the joke I thought it would be. It was well done and I think it's worth seeing.

I found it to be a okay movie, maybe something to watch when you are so terribly bored. This is due to the fact that the movie did not give the audience enough time to understand the characters, causing the audience to not be able to sympathize with them. And the ending of the movie was very open-ended, leaving the audience confused.

"Friend Request" follows a college student named Laura (Alycia Debnam Carey) who receives a friend request on Facebook from a lonely girl named Marina (Liesl Ahlers) who has 0 friends. Laura accepts the friend request out of pity but quickly regrets it as Marina becomes obsessed with Laura in a very short amount of time. Once Marina's overwhelming advances of friendship are rejected by Laura, she decides to take her own life, film it, and put it on the internet. After Marina's death Laura begins to lose control of her life and her facebook account due to further harassment from Marina's ghost.

I felt like the plot was an OK lead in to a very familiar concept, college kids getting picked off one by one while one person tries to figure things out and find a way to stop the person or thing that is terrorizing them. After the initial set up this movie really starts to look a lot like a number of previous modern day horror films, it just makes no effort whatsoever to try to shake things up a bit. They took an overused formula and stuck to it pretty much to the tee. I even find it hard to write much about the film because it was so bland and just didn't really offer much at all. You will predict every twist, you will see every death coming, and you will not be shocked by the ending at all.

I tend to like these kinds of movies so I was willing to forgive a lot of the film's clichés, but it got to the point where it just felt like the film makers were going down a list of horror movie clichés and checking them off as they made the movie. It's not the worst movie ever, it looks good, the acting is good enough, and a few of the kills weren't bad. However there just isn't enough here to warrant watching it over many similar films that are much better. "Friend Request" is simply a film that is so Luke warm that it's hard to think of much good things or bad things about it.

4/10