Friend Request

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.

Horror movies about the evils of social media tend to be as transparent and sophomoric as the audiences they are intended for, and after seeing the abortion that was "Unfriended", I expected less than nothing from a film with a similar premise. How shocked was I to find that this film didn't suck, and actually did some very clever things despite being a movie about fake online friend lists. The acting was good to great, the SFX was extremely well done and nicely implemented, the script was written by people who know how real teens are supposed to talk (with swear words and sarcasm that isn't usually found in children's movies), and the story just wasn't awful, and I mean that in the best way possible. When you expect nothing and are still disappointed, it makes you wonder why you bothered watching the movie in the first place (as was the case with Unfriended). But this film does a great job of not being made for children, is often clever in the best way, and some of the events that transpire are the exact opposite of what I would have expected. Overall, I enjoyed my time with this movie. It's not a masterpiece, and it won't win any awards, but it was enjoyable. In the end, any movie that can just be enjoyed as it is is a winner in my book.

"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

My wife and I started it, expecting to watch another bad horror movie on Netflix and laugh at it, but we were actually kinda surprised at how scared we got. It's not a classic by any means, and it's not great, but it's solidly spooky, even though it relies on a bunch of jump scares.