Unfriended

Unfriended

"Way to go, Blumhouse. I am so sick of a bunch of unlikable shit heads in a horror movie." - Phelous

Genre:	Horror Thriller Mystery Drama
Directed By:	Leo Gabriadze
Produced By:	Timur Bekmambetov Nelson Greaves
Written By:	Nelson Greaves
Starring:	Shelley Hennig Moses Jacob Storm Renee Olstead Will Peltz Jacob Wysocki Courtney Halverson Heather Sossaman
Photography:	Color
Distributed By:	Universal Pictures
Release Date:	July 20, 2014 (Fantasia) April 17, 2015 (United States)
Runtime:	83 minutes
Country:	United States Russia
Language:	English
Budget:	$1 million
Box Office:	$64.1 million
Franchise:	Unfriended
Sequel:	Unfriended: Dark Web

Unfriended is a 2014/2015 American video-meeting footage supernatural horror film directed and produced by Levan Gabriadze and written by Nelson Greaves. The film is presented as a computer screen film, being told almost entirely through a screencast of a MacBook. The film premiered at the Fantasia Festival on July 20, 2014, before receiving a theatrical release through Universal Pictures in the United States on April 17, 2015.

A stand-alone sequel film, Unfriended: Dark Web, was released in 2018.

Plot

One night, while teenagers Blaire, Mitch, Jess, Adam Ken and Val take part in an online group chat session, they are suddenly joined by a user known only as "Billie227." Thinking it's just a technical glitch, the friends carry on their conversation... until Blaire begins receiving messages from someone claiming to be Laura Barns, a classmate who killed herself exactly one year prior. As Blaire tries to expose Billie's identity, her friends are forced to confront their darkest secrets and lies.

Why It Sucks

The movie goes to show that many Hollywood writers know nothing about how children think or work.
It is a by-the-numbers slasher script: the antagonist is a wronged person returning from the grave to enact revenge, and the protagonists are a group of people with dark secrets. The only change it makes is to add "on the Internet!" to everything.
Poor acting from the cast.
Relies on clichés, such as jump scares.
Of the two main deaths, the hand-in-a-blender wouldn't actually be fatal (loss of a hand is eminently survivable and the blender would jam when it hit bone anyway, although Ken does slit his throat) and the curling iron only would be if Jess choked to death on it.
The main characters are extremely unlikable and unsympathetic, as they were partially involved in the video that prompted Laura's suicide, and they range from jerks to very despicable. They have also committed some sort of betrayal to each other (e.g, cheating, spreading rumors, etc.).
- Laura is also a jerk too, she made a video telling everyone in the world to go f*ck themselves, even though it was only the protagonists's faults.
- Blaire is a moron, constantly turning to Mitch every time she gets scared because she is too much of a wet blanket to do anything herself. She was also the one who recorded the video that lead to Laura killing herself.
If you remove the scenes where Ken lodges his hand into a blender and Jess has a hair-curling iron shoved down her throat, the movie isn't really even a horror film.
Every character in the film cannot go without a single sentence without a curse word, which shows they are trying to make themselves look cool.
- They also keep on typing "your" or "you're" as "ur" over and over again until it gets on your nerves (or should we say "ur nerves"? *ba dum tss*).
It has a pretty interesting, but also stupid concept. The entire film is focused on Blaire's laptop screen.
There are a couple of errors with the Macbook that Blaire uses, one of which showing that Blaire's hard drive is only 16 GB, which is barely enough for the macOS operating system.
The ending is just dumb. It just involves everyone that got killed which it ends on a cliffhanger.
Plot hole: The video that caused Laura Barns to commit suicide shouldn't even be on YouTube in the first place as one of the policies on YouTube is for bullying.
It is really boring most of the time, and it feels like it drags on for a while.

Redeeming Qualities

The death scenes actually look realistic in gore terms, if not in terms of actual possibility.
The Universal opening logo looks cool.
Some unintentionally hilarious scenes.
The film uses unsent and deleted messages to show what is going on inside the character's head rather than them just telling the viewers outright.
As said above, while stupid, the concept of a movie that takes place on the protagonist's computer does sound interesting.

Reception

Despite Unfriended receiving mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, it was shown to be a disappointment from the audiences. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 62% based on 185 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Unfriended subverts found-footage horror clichés to deliver a surprisingly scary entry in the teen slasher genre with a technological twist.". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 59 out of 100 based on 30 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". In CinemaScore polls conducted during the opening weekend, cinema audiences gave Unfriended an average grade of "C", on an A+ to F scale.

Videos

Trivia

The film's official website had an interactive video, and you could chat to Laura Barns (supposedly billie227). It was made to promote the film before and during its cinema release: however, it is now gone.

External links

Unfriended at the Internet Movie Database
Unfriended on Rotten Tomatoes

Comments

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EijiZeBoi

18 months ago

Score 8

If only Blaire admitted to her crimes...