The Friendship Game

This film escapes the trappings of most teen horror films. Even so, this does not make the film more likable. A refreshing aspect of the film shows 4 high school kids that have been life long friends without a focus on social media idiocy. It's almost a nod to the days where you spent time with people rather than sit with people while on your phone. From here it jumps into the horror that will be bestowed upon the bunch. Ultimately there is only one friendship that matters. Rather than look at the film and dissect every single syllable uttered on screen I will close by stating that this is exactly what it is billed to be, a horror movie about testing friendship. It's not a movie you must watch but if you do you'll be slightly entertained.

The real friendship game is asking your friends to watch this and then seeing if they remain friends with you.

This starts off fine, but within 5 minutes it goes downhill into a confusing poorly written and directed mess. It is so difficult to figure out what is going on: Is this real? Is this a flashback? Is this a flashforward? Certain scenes will replay again line for line or scenes will repeat with slight variations. The movie continues on being like this until it reaches its conclusion which ends up being even worse than the rest of the movie. Multiple people were involved in this movie: someone actually wrote this garbage, someone else directed it and along the way no one involved said anything about how bad it was.

Maybe there's an alternate timeline/universe where this is a good movie.

Zooza (Peyton List), Rob Plattier (Brendan Meyer), Courtney (Kelcey Mawema), and Cotton Allen (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) are longtime small town best friends. They are set to scatter after graduation. Cotton buys the mysterious Friendship Game at a yard sale. The friends have to tell their deepest secret desires. Their friendship survives if they survive. Cotton disappears and the friends' desires start coming true. There is also a hacker who recorded their game session.

The plot is a mess. My first suggestion is to get rid of the computer hacker. I don't get his character. In addition, the simple gameplay gets muddied by bad story telling. It's all a mess. There is a simple idea here somewhere. It's not necessarily a good horror idea, but more clarity would help this movie a lot.

I really tried to like this movie and give it a good try, I think the concept was good and I was excited to see this put together especially with Peyton List, to see her take on horror and see what she could show us.

However, the main motives of the movie were never solved which has been a major problem for most, the characters were meant to be challenged and it's easy to say the characters haven't been challenged very much, with the switching back and forth of characters making it a confusing way of conveying the story too.

Could have been a short episode to bring some interest but definitely not good as a whole movie Again, really tried with this one to make it make sense and add theory but there's not enough given there.

Please do yourself the biggest favor and spare yourself the hour and some change of your life that you will never get back watching this mess of a film. Honestly, the characters are vapid, shallow people you never truly care about, the story is a confusing mess, and you never truly get what the hell is happening in any given time, scenes just repeat over and over for no reason as it doesn't add much to anything. It dragged so hard because of it... Get to the point already in which they never did. They tried to make this edgy and cool mix of a sort of Hellraiser, Wish Upon, Ground Hog Day type fiasco and it ended up confusing and plain stupid.

If this is how 2024 is beginning for me choosing this wreck of film to watch, I hope the rest of the year isn't as bad. Geesh.