Release Date: July 20, 2018
Cast: Colin Woodell, Rebecca Rittenhouse, Betty Gabriel, Andrew Lees
Director: Stephen Susco
Studio: Blumhouse Productions, Bazelevs Company
Distributor: BH Tilt, OTL Licensing
IMDB | Rotten Tomatoes | Wikipedia
Spoilers: Medium
This movie is absolutely awful. No need to bury the lede. Don’t go see this. Giving this movie money encourages more of these terrible, low effort horror movies to exist.
Still not convinced? Ok, let’s get into it.
Unfriended: Dark Web picks up with our…I hesitate to say hero… our protagonist getting set up on his new MacBook. So we get to watch that cinematic experience, a Mac screen as someone tries to guess the password. Ugh. I don’t know about you, but after working in front of computers all day, watching the ‘screen’ of a laptop for a movie is just frustrating. Watching applications crash or video to pixelate doesn’t build terror, it just agitates.
So anyway, our hero gets his way into this laptop and he begins making his nightly Skype calls, first to his girlfriend, then to his group of friends. In messing around on the new laptop he discovers some strange programs and videos. One of which, The River, appears to be a dark web browser that connects the original owner of the laptop with a nefarious group.
Together the Skype group discovers the truth, the original owner of the laptop made snuff films for purchasers on the dark web, and these people want it back. Here, is where the movie almost stumbles into a good idea, despite its best efforts to the contrary. Some of the scariest moments in horror are when the audience sees the threat, or movement and suggestion of a malevolent presence that the characters are not aware of. This movie has that built into it but instead, for whatever nonsense reason the filmmakers decided that what would really make it spooky is if they pixelated the bad guys. It is just terrible.
English