#Horror

I'll make it short, since this "movie" is not even worth too many words - I already wasted too much time watching it anyway. Whoever thought this to be a atmospheric horror flick must be totally new to the genre, the best thing about this movie is the snowy landscape.

It strengthens my point of view that it's never a good start to be the writer, director and producer of a movie. Seems like everyone else was telling those people that their movie is actually crap and they should work a bit more on the script - I for sure would have strongly recommended it. I am glad beyond words that this writer- director-producer jack-of-all-trades spared us an acting "career".

There is absolutely nothing special about this movie. And the really cheap photoshopped inserts of some "internet-content" is just ... lame.

Avoid it You can.

A misguided, poorly directed film. The main message fails horribly, as it ignores obvious mental illness and bullying in a failed, shoehorned attempt to jab at social media and technology. The only redeeming features of this film are Timothy Hutton's forced overacting, and the unsettling amount of throbbing egg shots.

All hail the egg.

Seriously one of the worst movies ever. Complete screen writing and directorial crap. Battlefield Earth and Roadhouse are SAG Award winners in comparison. Apparently based on a true story, the screenplay focuses for far too long on trying to establish the characters as spoiled, self-indulgent social media obsessed sociopaths without ever offering viewers a single reason to either empathize or despise any of them. If the attempt was to portray the main characters as the real horror of humanity, and their mean-girl personalities as delivering its own type of psychological carnage - the attempt was laughable. Seriously, if you've read this review, you've already wasted too much time and energy on this film.

Holy sh*t you guys, this movie is absolutely terrible, I can't possibly sugar coat that, or make it any simpler to understand. This movie is atrocious. Supposedly inspired by actual events, though the Wikipedia page seems to say that those "events" were the fact that the director knew someone affected by cyber-bullying, but I digress, and feel free to send me the real story.

Now, I recognize that when it comes to movies about bullying, or teens in peril, we are supposed to take them seriously because BULLYING YOU GUIZ, and I'm sure some people will give this movie more credit because of that, but the movie is just fundamentally broken on every front. Writing, acting, editing, production, the whole movie doesn't work, and it was a genuine chore to get through. While some may consider the ending to be "totally f***cccckkkked upppppp", there's just nothing there and if there is, it's buried deep under a huge pile of confusion and garbage.

The first issue I had with this were the actors. The teen girls cast in this movie are awful. Their characters are completely unredeemable and unpleasant, and the performances given from all of them border on being totally unwatchable. We essentially spend the first hour and ten minutes (no, that's not an exaggeration), watching these girls be horrible to each other, and watch their garbage parents be horrible as well. There's not one character in the movie who I had much sympathy or care for. They make attempts to create sympathetic characters, giving some of them ham-fisted back stories regarding suicide or just having them be taunted for their weight. Now, I don't mean to say that teens don't have bad lives, or hard times, or taunt each other, but the way that they are portrayed here creates an insanely unbelievable bunch of human beings. Nothing feels genuine, with the exception of the total and complete obsession with their cellphones.

On the topic of their cellphones, the girls all seem to be obsessed with the same app, which is some kind of bizarre combination of Candy Crush and Instagram that amounts to a senseless mess that fill the screen with indecipherable nonsense for a third of the running time. This is present immediately in the credits, which are absurdly fast for absolutely no reason, and the faux app just feels cheap and stupid. The kids obsess over this app and you're forced to watch them post on it for 45 excruciating minutes.

There are a couple of recognizable faces in the movie, primarily Chloe Sevigny (American Horror Story), who I know for a fact can do SO MUCH BETTER THAN THIS. You also get a brief appearance from Taryn Manning (Orange is the New Black), and Natasha Lyonne (Orange is the New Black), who are all fine actors, but they just have nothing to do in this movie. One thing that I will give credit to this movie for, however, is the huge number of female characters that star here. This is such an unfortunately rare thing in horror, and I don't want to discourage a female-fronted film ever. With that said though, the characters and actors in this movie are just wasted on such a weird mess of a film.

#Horror was the writing/directorial debut of actress Tara Subkoff (The Cell, The Notorious Betty Page), and I say again I love seeing women making horror movies, but this is just a mess from all fronts. Maybe it's just a case of first-time jitters, or something to that effect, but the movie just doesn't work and tries to pull of some bizarre style elements that feel awkward. There's a certain vibe of "Hello fellow kids" throughout this whole movie, that you usually see with adults trying to related directly to teenagers without gathering much context.

Now, there are a couple of genuinely interesting and effective shots in the movie, but that's kind of like saying that an album with one good song on it is a good album. The pieces do not make a cohesive whole, and the movie falls really flat. The shots that work do give me hope for the future, but that could also be due to cinematographer Learan Kahanov, but I'm not familiar enough with their work to really say for sure.

Yes, bullying is real, yes kids are horrible monsters to each other, regardless of all that, this movie really sucks. Give it a hard pass.

Sometimes a movie comes along with the best of intentions, but its execution is simply so bad that the message gets lost. "#Horror" (R, 1:41) is one of those. The film is basically about cyberbullying, which is a serious problem in the U.S., especially among teens. According to figures from bullyingstatistics.org and Wikipedia.com, about half of all American teenagers experience cyberbullying at some point, about 1/3 per year and about 10-20 percent on a regular basis. Cyberbullying affects girls and boys roughly equally and includes all races. Many victims are more likely to have low self-esteem and consider suicide – with some having tragically completed the act. Statistics, facts and stories can bring attention to the problem, but few methods can bring it to life more effectively than a movie – IF the movie in question is effective.

As six 12-year-old girls in Connecticut gather for a sleepover, the issue of cyberbullying is introduced in a pair of parent-child conversations and becomes a factor throughout the girls' day and evening together. As Sam (Sadie Seelert) is being driven to the party by her mom (Natasha Lyonne), Sam is clearly embarrassed by her family's low socioeconomic status as compared to the girls she is about to spend time with and she is desperate to fit in. Meanwhile, Cat (Haley Murphy) is being lectured by her father, Dr. White (Timothy Hutton). Cat has been the victim of cyberbullying and (as is often the case) has also become a perpetrator. By the time Sam and Cat each arrive at the home of their host, Sophia (Bridget McGarry), three other girls, Georgie (Emma Adler), Francesca (Mina Sundwall) and Ava (Blue Lindberg) are already in Sophia's basement speaking unkindly about Cat and Sam, which Sam overhears before she enters the room… but she goes in anyway. And this is only the beginning of the girls' meanness.

No one is spared hurt feelings in this movie. The sleepover activities – playing dress-up, swimming, dancing, talking, etc. – are infused with the girls picking on each other in a way that they may think is playful, but doesn't seem to feel that way to the girl(s) on the receiving end. These tweens mercilessly tease each other about things like lacking money, being fat, enduring family embarrassment (and even trauma) and generally not fitting in. They supplement their taunts by posting pictures of each other online along with cruel hashtags. Things occasionally get very heated between some of the girls and, at one point, Sophia throws Cat out of the house. Cat leaves a very emotional voice mail for her father, who tries to call her back, fails to reach her and shows up at the house to lecture, yell at and threaten the girls. Sophia's mother (Chloë Sevigny) has left the girls alone for a while to take care of some personal business, and Sophia's father (Balthazar Getty) isn't home either, so there's no one to defend the girls from Dr. White's erratic behavior or to help him look for Cat. Things go downhill for the girls to the point that the audience gets a decent final 10 minutes, but that's the only real horror in the movie.

Filmmakers who want to make a horror movie sometimes need to be reminded that horrifying and horrible are not the same thing. These performances range from barely passable to just plain bad, in spite of the presence of an Oscar nominee (Sevigny) and an Oscar winner (Hutton) in the cast, but the actors are done no favors by a script that has them doing and saying things that often make very little sense. The words of caution and life lessons that writer-director Tara Subkoff clearly wants to convey are randomly scattered through the script as one-liners or isolated incidents that are almost completely lacking in coherence. But even with criticisms like these, you'd expect a big-screen release to at least display a certain professional technical expertise, wouldn't you? The cinematography is inconsistent in its look and many of the camera shots are of poor quality. And don't get me started on the distracting flashes of barely understandable and essentially meaningless cartoonish graphics throughout the film.

The worst thing about this movie is the important themes it tries to explore and the vital points that it wants to make are all buried beneath amateurish filmmaking. Even though this story hits many of the right notes, few people who see the movie will benefit from them. Although it doesn't have as much to say as this film is trying to, 2015's "Unfriended" is a cautionary tale of cyberbullying that is at least semi-entertaining. Still, there's a void to be filled. A topic as important as cyberbullying deserves an equally important and well-made movie. Here's hoping that we get one soon, because "#Horror" ain't it. "D"