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The internet is pretty damn

The story here is pretty simple, as far as horror movies go. We look at a computer screen from the perspective of Blaire. Her friends start a video conference, and they are soon haunted by the memory of their friend who committed suicide due to cyber bullying (and I guess some regular bullying too). Her friends start dying from forced suicide (or suicide from being possessed by a spirit), and they must play this spirit's game in order to survive.

I was pretty excited to see if this movie could accomplish being scary from a bold new way of film making. I put the actual budget for this movie at about $50,000 maximum, and in an age where hundreds of millions of dollars is par for the course to spend on a film, that is pretty impressive; however, only impressive if it works. Luckily, this movie works. Let's get this out of the way right now. This movie is in no way perfect. The characters are pretty weak, but since I never expect anything mind blowing from a horror movie's story I wasn't let down. The characters in this are basically copy and pasted from a book called "every horror movie character ever." I was hoping after "Cabin in the Woods" came out, horror movies would pay more attention to the characters, but sadly here I sit. We had the overweight, hacker, joker type. The main protagonist, the jock, the good boy, and the slut. Not all was lost for the characters, luckily they do kind of play around with the classic horror movie tropes, so the people that you expect to fit certain character designs are switched. There is something else I like about the character design, but it enters spoiler territory so I will just say: none of the main characters are really likable. Which is great, not exactly original, but still great.

The thing that surprised me the most about this film was the storyline. The story here was spot-on for today's generation. It wasn't perfect (the haunting from an angry spirit thing is starting to get really old), but there are certain parts of this movie that should appeal to today's generation. The moral of this story is the biggest home-run. This movie tackles cyber bullying above all else, and that is a growing issue for today, since anyone can be anonymous. Now there is a movie out there that says cyber-bullying has consequences, albeit you won't be possessed by a vengeful spirit, but still. If there were more movies out there like this, I feel like the message could come across to today's youth a little more than it is.

The biggest question here, as always, is: Was it scary? Actually, yeah, kind of. Look, it takes a lot for a movie to scare me these days, but this movie had some great scary elements. The way it was shot allowed for loading screens to serve as tension builders. Every part of this movie was made well enough to scare the layman horror movie watcher. The ending kind of annoyed me as far as horror endings go, but that is only because I saw it coming. The sound made the movie all the more tense, and the relatability to certain computer problems made the movie hit home. It made the movie feel more real that it was. If you are looking to be scared there might finally be a movie out there for you.

Normally, I go through the acting at the end, but how bad could teenagers mess up being teenagers. Seriously, if the acting in this turned out bad I would have no hope for the next generation of actors. So was it good. Sure. They acted like teenagers. No big deal.

Final Verdict: See it in Theaters Just a hair under flawless, for a horror movie. If it weren't for a few choices in the character and story department I would say that this movie was well worth buying. Still a pretty great piece of work.