Dead Tweenager Flick: #Horror (2015)

#Horror (2015)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Sadie Seelert, Haley Murphy, Bridget McGarry

A group of snobbish posh tween girls gather at a backwoods house that resembles something Andy Warhol vomited, designed and then rejected. These "friends" more or less hate each other at a cynical degree, but they seem to have no problem hanging out to play dress up, do some underage drinking, yak about boys, and mercilessly attack one another in social media. 

When one of them went a tad too far on her passive-aggressive bullying, she's forced out of the house and disappears into the snowy forest, prompting the appropriate (and less than appropriate) angry response of her father when he drops by after she called him about what happened. Albeit startled, the girls are quick to brush this incident off, save for the missing girl's friend, Sam, who decides to go look for her while the rest of the gang continues their pre-teen debauchery.  

Unknown to them all, however, a masked killer is out in the woods and have found their way into the house, knife at hand. All I can say is, with only twenty minutes left clocking in a hundred minute movie, what took this shmuck so long?!

Now, I want to like #Horror as I understand what it is trying to do; it's attempting to hammer down a message that social media may have gone too far in this day and age where everything is acceptable so long as it will garner the easy approval and attention of people, even if it costs real friendship and one's self acceptance. The preteen girls in this film shows the effect of this new age way of thinking, robbing them most of their youth and innocence, addicting them to a system of likes and dislikes under a shallow community made up of equally shallow people, so-called "friends" who are more than ready to stab anybody's backs just to be on the top without fully understanding the consequences of their actions.

Now, as a surreal art film of sorts, #Horror tried its hardest to incorporate this message with all the fancy-shmancy striking visuals and mumblecore-esque dialogue. In some scenes it kinda works, but to sit through an hour and nearly forty-minutes of tween girls acting like old rich biddies who have nothing better to do at a Sunday afternoon other than gossip and insult one another with verbal fangs, these little slices of philosophical hiccups are underwhelming compared to the annoying shit storm that are the characters.

Not a single one of these tweens are likable, this including our supposed goodie-good final girl Sam who is mostly boring in the run. The adults are just as terrible, with one of the girls' mothers being particularly annoying with her dry demeanor, making her one of the bigger contributions to why I couldn't enjoy #Horror any more than I could as she didn't even bite it. Brutally. If there is anybody I really wanted to root for in this flick, it is the killer, but even they were lacking in the intimidation and creative killing department. That being said, a good bunch of the murders were edited with this sugary loud flashy sparkles and social media site buttons that I guess were supposed to symbolize how desensitized our generation is with violence to the point that it is just a norm to modern day brats, but watching obnoxious diva-wannabes yakking their annoying social drama for messy chunks of time, said editing just comes out as equally annoying and atrocious, which doesn't help with the fact that the slayings are mostly not that intense even with the fact that these are preteen victims. (Baby Blues (2008) already beat this flick on the kids-as-slasher-victims card so, yeah, nothing new here.)

So as you all can tell, I'm struggling to like #Horror. There's a fine line between being subtly artsy about a message to shoving it down on our gullet and this film took the chances to do the former a tad too hard that it unknowingly does the latter. It wanted to be a high-art take on a slasher flick with a sensible meaning behind the madness, but it felt more like a test for one's patience. Maybe it is and perhaps I'm just not the right kind of audience this movie was reaching out to, which kinda made sense since I don't really do a lot of Social Media. (I think I'm one of the few remaining humans who doesn't own a Facebook page, a fact that often have people looking at me weirdly as if I have leprosy...) If you're down to throw yourself into a movie where a bunch of ungrateful girls are the scarier villains than the masked psycho out to kill them, then here it is. Indulge.

Bodycount:
1 male had his throat cut with a knife
1 female murdered with a knife
1 girl found murdered, method unknown
1 girl gets her throat cut with a knife
1 girl repeatedly knifed, bled to death
1 male shot
1 girl shot through the mouth
Total: 7