For movie 2 on week 2 we have a movie about cyber-bullying. GONE WRONG!

#Horror, (I’m not kidding!) just the title alone should give you a good idea of what the next hour and a half holds. The toxic internet meets a dumb horror movie meets some tweens meets me and you have this review.

The opening scene has us following a man cheating on his wife with a younger woman, inside his swanky Ferrari and in the middle of the cold cold day. You get a taste of some the bad acting and, most importantly, the awful editing when the guy is suddenly murdered by the masked killer. Like all modern day serial killers they share their murders on Instagram, but unlike Instagram this social media platform is a cross between Twitter, Candy Crush and one of those obnoxiously bright poker machines. Of course every button on this site has a hashtag symbol next to it. So for the rest of this review I’ll be calling the site Shenani Taggers.

#Horror mainly takes place in a fancy art gallery house in the middle of nowhere. Two young girls force their parents to drop them off 5 blocks away from Chloe Sevigny’s bitchy daughter’s house. Besides knowing this girl’s rich I can’t tell you if she’s the most popular kid in their grade or if she’s real big on Shenani Taggers. Our main character is going because she’s an outcast with no friends. The other main girl lost her mum recently and they blame Chloe Sevigny for her death and she’s constantly being bullied by Chloe Sevigny’s daughter. Her rich father, despite knowing his daughter is going to have an awful time with Chloe Sevigny’s daughter, lets her go and have an awful time.

Our 13 year old characters decide to have a fashion show, though from my perspective it looks like they’re playing dress-up with their parents clothing. My problems start right here because if I wasn’t doing this series I seriously would have shut the movie off. I feel bad for these girls that they had to say this awful cringey dialogue, though to be fair this is what most teenage girls sound like minus the tamed potty mouth.

The other thing is because it’s about kids on their phones and being bullied online, everyone is just relentlessly mean. The dead mum girl starts been a pain to the chunky girl by calling her names, sending hate messages and #Horror’s brilliant way of resolving this issue is to be an equal pain in the butt. It’s just unnecessarily cruel and difficult to watch. I don’t really care about these kids, but I don’t think they deserve this much hate. Another solution apparently is dead mum girl tells the world she’s going to kill herself by flipping the photos on her Candy Crush app and gets the death hashtag sign. That really made my day.

I’m no expert in any way, but this isn’t how you deal with cyber-bullying. When faced with a bully you either ignore them, block them or find better friends. Instead of killing myself I would talk to someone like my parents or seek professional help. Throwing petty insults just makes it worse while making yourself feel worse.  I’m guessing if the movie did this then there wouldn’t be a movie.

Now our movie wants to not focus on cyber-bullying, but on our phones and how we shouldn’t use them 24/7. All of a sudden nice rich girl locks all their phones away until her mum comes back. Then she says the first relevant news, that they don’t need a landline anymore, which is very true! But what if things go wrong and you just locked away your only source of communicating with the outside world. The tweens are phoneless and apparently that’s the end of the world. It appears the only thing they can do is things normal teens don’t do or just crapping on each other. None of you have ever heard of Monopoly or played a video game called Minecraft? That could easily take up a whole afternoon and not destroy friendships.

The plot restarts again when the suicidal girl’s dad starts losing it on these girls. He has seriously lost it to the point of putting a knife up to a 12 year old girl, Jesus man! He comes back closer to the end and it’s equally as hilarious as the first time. Around here is where some of the girls can’t take the heat so they just leave. Without asking for their phones to call their parents or to call the police to arrest the crazy man that threatens their lives. Nah, phones are bad, period.

Around here is where the killer starts to become a bit more involved as he stops stalking and filming our heroes. Our characters start noticing dead bodies everywhere and too bad they can’t call anyone to help them out. The annoying fat girl is taken out and it’s revealed that the dead mum girl is the killer. Who could have seen this coming! They try to throw you off earlier in the movie by saying the ghost of Old Man Jenkins has been haunting this nice house for many years now. I guessing the writers realised how stupid that sounded, but kept it in anyway so they can have the cool twist villain. It’s also pretty obvious as the killer only starts to pop up after dead mum girl runs off into the woods, but how she killed that guy at the beginning and cleaned up before seeing her dad is beyond me.

They get their phones back, dead mum girl kills herself with only main girl and bitchy girl surviving Chloe Sevigny almost running them over. Dead girl’s murder pics gets a ton of likes on Shenani Taggers and thank God is it finally over!!! Now for a positive recommendation.

Why should you watch #Horror? Shenani Taggers is a very flashy app, good for babies. The cinematography is good, you get some nice shots of the house and the surrounding areas. Whenever there are no kids around the movie is actually watchable. Cringey teenage dialogue is always fun to listen to and posting selfies of your pals all over Shenani Taggers. It spreads awareness of the uselessness of landline phones. This movie could also be shown in schools on how not to spread awareness of cyber-bullying and finally, how not to pander to teenagers.

That’s it for another week and before you go I wanted to mention something that I didn’t think was relevant in my first review. I have created a list on Letterboxd ranking these movies on enjoyment value. From entertaining to unwatchable and with only two movies I bet it will be impossible to guess which goes where. I’ll catch you all next week and I have been The Blog Complainer, signing out.

Horrid Horrors Ranking List