Sign up to add this to your collection
|
Sign up to add this to your favorites
|
|
41%
Overall Rating
|
|
Ranked #5,541
...out of 20,698 movies
|
Sign up to check in!
|
Six friends receive a mysterious chain letter via text messaging and in their email accounts from a maniac who's hunting down teenagers who fail to forward his online chain letter. Who knew they should take the threats in the chain letter seriously? Or that chain letters using the teens' favorite technologies to track them can kill? This maniacal game pits friend against friend as they race to beat rules that seem impossible to escape. Break the chain, lose a life. Do you pass it on? Does friendship mean anything?
--TMDb
|
|
Let's get this out of the way -- "Chain Letter" is not quite as bad as you would expect. It's not good but it's not terrible either. It should have received a direct-to-video release but, for some reason, a decision was made that it held enough interest and quality to release to the masses. Don't know why. Don't care. I didn't pay $6.75 to see this film because I thought it was going to revolutionize horror. I paid $6.75 to escape for a couple of hours into a world where people always do the wrong thing and where common sense and practicality are only as common as unicorns and dragon tears. "Chain Letter" provided said escape. And, boy, did it provide.
In the tradition of shitty slasher films from the late-90's and early-00's -- "Chain Letter" is about a group of kids (or twenty-thirty-somethings pretending to be kids) being picked off, one-by-one, by a sadistic killer. This particular maniac chooses his victims via 'chain letter'. He e-mails a chain letter than threatens death to anyone who does not forward it to five friends. If you forward it -- you're safe (kind of). If you delete it -- you die. Nikki Reed (who has come a long way since "Thirteen") stars as Jessie, your heroine for the film. Jessie gets to sit back and watch her friends die while she slowly deciphers what is going on around her. Keith David stars as Detective Crenshaw, determined to find out who or what is killing the teens around him. Throw in Brad Dourif as an eccentric and creepy professor and Charles Fleischer as a profiler and you've rounded out the cast nicely.
What else to say? Some of the kills here are pretty enjoyable. Football player Johnny (Matt Cohen) basically gets his head sawed off by the killer using chains like a saw. One of the lovely young ladies literally gets ripped apart when her parents drive their separate ways in the morning. The most horrific death turns out to be the least creative -- all the killer does is hit someone in the head with a chain and split their head open and watch as the blood comes pouring out of the wound. I won't describe my favorite kill in the film but let's just say it involves a former actor from "Desperate Housewives". And try to count how many times it rains in the film. It felt like these characters were living in the damned rain forest -- yet no one evidently owns a raincoat or slicker.
Most of the acting here is top-notch schlock -- especially the voice-over recorded for one terrible phone call received by Crenshaw towards the end of the film. Keith David is far too good here and it felt like maybe his agent was playing a trick on him or something. Cody Kasch does the best of the younger actors and makes the most out of his role. "Chain Letter" felt like "Stay Alive" mixed with a little "See No Evil" only without a professional wrestler or Frankie Muniz. Is it worse than a lot of other crap that gets released in theatres? No. Did it deserve one? Hell no. Nothing memorable here other than a couple kills and the film doesn't have an ending. Not really. I think they ran out of money or something.
So, there you have it. Not terrible but not good either. You figure this one out for yourselves. 5/10.
|
|
#1:
Chad
- added January 7, 2012 at 6:18am
I wasn't blown away or anything, but it was
alright. Like the review said, there were some
neat kills and a decent killer, and that goes a
long way in this household. I wasn't too fond of
the lack of an ending though - seriously, the
movie just stops in the middle of a scene. It
feels like the last ten minutes came up missing
and they just said "fuck it" and
released it anyway.
|
|
Rate Movie? 
