Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)

I don’t see many horror films. Part of this is due to films like Hereditary that scare the living daylights out of me, as I, like many normal people, don’t often choose to scare myself. A larger portion of my aversion to the genre, perhaps, is the reputation mainstream horror films have these days. Especially when looking at Blumhouse-produced films, they are plain garbage. The characters make the worst possible decisions every time they have a choice presented to them simply to drive them into a terrible situation that will somehow kill them mercilessly with blood and gore everywhere, and often the scares used are cheap gimmickry and fake jump scares that do nothing but relieve the audience and bore them into their seats.

Seeing Unfriended: Dark Web yielded almost that exact response from me. I was either laughing or scoffing at this movie for all of its eighty-eight minutes because of how ridiculously stupid its characters are. It made me furious yet enthused because Dark Web thought I, a frequent moviegoer, would be dumb enough to actually accept everything I was seeing and go along with it.

Unfortunately, the film dwells in this territory of so-bad-it’s-good for too little time to be entertaining in that sense. The first and third acts are often so ridiculous and over the top that they become comedic, but the plot’s second act takes too long and has such slow pacing that it becomes boring. It’s not that the bad decisions of the characters stop; they just take so long to make them that instead of being dumb gut choices they become a sign of pitiful, sad logic.

The one thing that the film has going for it – its method of storytelling – even falls short at times, with the apps and services being used both performing far better than I have ever experienced them in the real world and allowing for behaviors that seem a bit too powerful, especially on Mac OS. Every program works as conveniently as the plot needs it to, and that makes the whole idea of a film on a screen fall apart to nothing more than a poorly used gimmick.

I think that the Unfriended films have a very unique narrative device that can make for a good horror or thriller film; at this point, however, they just haven’t executed their vision properly to make them anything more than a gimmick. The rest of the film does not help this matter, as the cliched and trite characters make the same foolish decisions as those in other mainstream horror films. The potential of the idea of Dark Web has some merit, but a premise does not a good film make.

My recommendation: Skip it.

My rating: 25/100