Straker17
#Horror is a movie that so desperately tries to be relevant, but falls short in so, so many ways. It is a movie that has many "artistic" features, many themes that it "explores", and so many terrible chracters to hate.
The film attempts to be artistic, and in these attempts it tries to blur out the camera to "heighten" the "tension", and sporadically throws in shots of a supposed website that these girls use. However, this website does not look like any functional website, and I stared at it for most of the movie, attempting to figure out exactlky what it was and what purpose it served in the movie. And while you can justify footage of this website being thrown in, there is no way to justify the horrible design of it, and ultimately it just feels like the movie threw it in there hoping the critics would call the film "artsy".
As stated before, the film has many different messages it attempts to get through with this film. The core one is bullying, however, it makes so many mistakes in the process. Firstly, the audience that is going to get the most out of the message have nobody to relate to. Preteens and teenagers who suffer bullying the most are the ones who can gleen from the anti-bullying message of the film the most. However, we are shown a bunch of rich, overpriveledged girls. These aren't the types of girls who are going to watch a film like this. Even the character that doesn't come from a rich background blends in with the rich kids. Second, you are given nobody to sympathise with because everybody is both a victim and a bully. Every single character (even the adults) join in the bullying to some extent. So where does that leave your characters? Who are you supposed to sympathise with? The answer is supposed to be the main characters, but after a while, you begin to wonder who the main chracter is supposed to be, and ultimately, you have nobody to sympathise with.
The worst aspect of the movie by far is the character of Cat's father. When Cat gets lost in the woods after being thrown out of the house for how mean she is being, her father arrives at the house. He barges in and instantly begins shouting at the girls. Eventually one of the girls runs off into the woods to look for Cat, and he just lets her leave (which is what he is yelling at the girls for letting his daughter do in the first place). He grabs these girls by the head, and even by the necklace at some point, he slaps them, and even goes as far as to threaten them with a knife. And he isn't even the villain!
The movie doesn't even work as a horror. The first hour and fifteen minutes is so heavily focused on the bullying drama that it forgets to create any ammount of tension. All of the killings of this "slasher" happen in the last twenty minutes And the reveal of the killer doesn't even make much sense. She kills people that have nothing to do with any of this. But why wouldn't it be her? After all, she is the meanest one who gets thrown out of the house. She is the one who is shown to be mentally unhinged from the beginning. So, why not her? Really there is no answer to this, but it would have been nice to have been offered some explanation as to why she killed everybody. If it's because she feels bullied, her rage is unjustified because she is the first one to be a true bully in the movie. It also wouldn't explain why she would have killed the couple at the beginning of the movie or even how she did it considering she was held up at school.
It is such a shame considering these girls can act. They all portray themselves well as bullies and victims adding at least a small glimmer of realism to this movie, but their talent is completely wasted.
merieldonohue
Atrocious. *it's quite lengthy, so be warned* I don't have much to add that many of the reviews haven't said. If you are, by chance, stumbling onto mine first, this is what I have to say.So many elements of the supposedly haunted art in this house are so unbearably cliché; portraits and statues of people opening their eyes, things moving without explanation (most notably the pulsating egg-person), things moving suddenly without explanation, a light bulb flickering in a basement where a killer lay waiting, very generic 'psychotic/haunted/possessed' music throughout, etc. If the writers wanted to communicate that the haunted house was causing the girls to go insane, the sporadic shots of them dancing didn't do much to fill in what dialogue and the plot failed to. If the writers/director wanted to convey a message, the consensus (my opinion included) is that it was very much so obstructed and its meaning lost. If there was a takeaway, there was very little left over to think about; much of the message was exploited and stripped bare. For example, the viewer watches the beginning of the movie and formulates that these are (to an extent, it could very much vary from person to person) privileged teenagers who obsess over their phones and have little regard for other people. About halfway through, Dr. White (Cat's father) arrives at this person's house (I forgot who hosted the get-together, and it's irrelevant to my point), and lambastes the group for being self-centered, idiotic, mean, animal-like, etc.; the writers take assumptions that could've been made and uses them up until there is nothing left; there is no room to ponder on points trying to be made.I feel like the concept at hand (cyber-bullying and obsession over social media/smartphones) could've been worked into a horror/murder mystery much more skillfully than it was. The relation of social media and taunting to murder is not thought out well at all. The motive behind Cat killing everybody is that she wanted the avatar of her Instagram/Candy Crush portmanteau to have more 'likes' on her posts than anybody else, and the best way to go about doing that is to kill teenagers and post the photos of their dead bodies online, because that's really what people like to see? Weak and very unfathomable. Not the slightest shred of logic behind her train of thought. The app itself is also so very terrible in its design and concept (in my humble opinion); the only way I could see it gaining popularity within a group such as this is if an amateur app developer they knew made it. This can't be the case, however, because, according to the news story at the end of the movie, it had a following of many millions of people. The app and the concept behind it (sliding pictures together to get points? Why is a Candy Crush concept combined with the feature of being able to 'like' posts?) I cannot see getting a steady following; apparently people don't mind that it appears on the screen without having to turn your phone on, either (when it's locked in the walk-in safe). Also, it's popular to put a hashtag both in front and behind of a tag? Is it a murder/mutilation oriented kind of app? That would help explain why pressing the 'submit' button is followed by the sound of a gunshot or a guillotine (depends when in the movie you watch). If it is a murder oriented social media app, where more gruesome and mortal content is craved, surely Cat's posts won't be of any significance or specialty, like she believed they would? There are so many flaws within the design of the app in the movie.The man having an affair is named Harry Cox.If there were any redeeming qualities to a movie like this, it's that it's so bad that it can be mocked and laughed and enjoyed adequately just the same as a decent movie, right? WRONG. At least to me, it's not 'so bad it's good'; it's 'so bad it's bad'. Take, for example, The Room. It's a title that's renowned (or at least I would assume it is); why? Because when we watch the movie, the subtle things tell us that the writers, directors, anybody else involved, put in a genuine, whole-hearted effort to make a good piece of film. This is why it is funny, because of the failure to achieve their collective goal. When you watch #Horror, the same thing does not take place. Again, it is these subtle things; the writing, the things in the movie (take for example the social media platform (especially) and the artwork), the acting (most notably that of Dr. White), that tells you a different tale. To me, it appears that a whole-hearted effort was made to produce a movie aimed at gaining publicity as a movie so terrible it is ridiculous and contemptuous, hilariously so. When that happens, you can't sit back and laugh at its low quality when you know its doing its job; to instill a sense of "wow, that was terrible. How hilarious that somebody actually tried to make an Oscar contender". Examples I can think of are the social media app itself (seems an awful lot like it's mocking other social media apps, and poorly at that), and a desperate Mr. White's monologue in the woods, which features such gems as "Cat! Don't worry, I'll buy you a soup and sandwich", "I'll build a trap", and others (paraphrased). P.S.; I'd like to point out that, when the tale of the insane artist character was being told (his name was Ray something), there was talk about him going to a fortune-teller, and receiving news that there were 4 winds that converged on his property that bore spiritual significance. Other than Georgie saying 'that sounds like a fart' sometime soon afterwards, there was ABSOLUTELY NO further reference to this element of the plot.
