Friend Request [2016]

We decided to watch Friend Request on the recommendation of Kay's friend, Alex. Kay ran the idea past her students and while most of them agreed that it was bad, some thought it was funny bad and some just said it was regular bad. Overall, we were similarly on the fence.

The movie follows a college student who gets a friend request from the weird girl named Marina, who has no Facebook friends at all but posts a lot of gothic art. Marina quickly reveals herself to be a creepy stalker so she gets unfriended and then goes on a posthumous killing spree of all the main girl's friends after she committed suicide. There's a whole folklore tie in about how Marina is some kind of witch who is using a black mirror (the laptop, you get it?) to hide her soul in, which does kind of tie into a witch's scrying mirror but there isn't any actually lore to back up the possession thing. She also controls bees for some reason and uses them to kill. The film ends with Marina possessing the main girl, who now stalks around in a hoodie, looking for people to friend request.

This film had some good laughs in the bad acting, weird lines ("Unfriend that dead bitch!"), and confusing editing, but we aren't sure if we'd recommend it. The strangest things about it were really that it was directed by a Verhoven (no relation to Paul) and that the whole thing had a saturation that made it look kind of cheap. If bad horror sounds like your jam, go for it.

Spoon Rating: 4.5