I’m sure there’s a name someone has coined for this kind of movie at this point. I know I’ve seen a fair number of them myself so I feel like I should try and come up with my own sub-genre of horror movies that fit this bill. It all kind of circles around a group of teenagers (which is pretty standard for a horror flick) but the tie in for the movie is something very 21st century technology. There’s definitely tropes that create little groups of films for all kinds of different decades. While the late 70’s coined the slasher genre, it really took shape in the 80’s. Haunting movies as a genre have been around a long time but when you watch them at certain points in time, they have very different thematic elements that mirror aspects of culture concurrently. Some of it is the way the stories are told. Some of it is the kinds of effects that enhance, or detract in certain cases, the overall movie. Some low budget movies really hit big like Blair Witch or Paranormal Activity. Others end up in the bargain bin at Walmart. In our world today, there has been a growing number of movies where evil is found and/or bound to technology. Many times its cell phones but it can be any manner of technological device. That’s what this movie is really going for and they are attempting to do so with the worst plot, atrocious actors, and a great many computer sounding words they hope you don’t look up at any point.
The positives of this movie are a short list. It didn’t cost me anything to watch this other than time. The cover art for the film was pretty well done. It gave a good, creepy vibe to the whole thing. Yeah I think that’s about it. Literally. I sat here and even did that thing where I sort of tried to look off into the distance while I looked for any redeeming qualities of the film somewhere in my brain. There weren’t any. This movie blows.
The negatives are way easier to find. First is the whole evil application on your phone trope. It’s not like there’s as many of these movies as there are found footage but in a pond this small, you’ve gotta really do something to make yourself notable. A few years ago there was the film “Countdown” about an app that showed you the actual countdown to your death. As a group of friends began to find how eerily accurate it was as they were picked off one by one, it provided a real sense of urgency in the dread. It wasn’t bringing home any major awards but it was properly done and hit the mark for a decent horror movie. Many times I do have to remind myself that by and large horror movies are not well made. Even the “classics” everyone thinks are so great are actually pretty crappy when you go back and watch them. Not all of them but there are a select few horror movies that stand the test of time. For as many of them out there as there are, a very small portion of scary movies are any good. So while Countdown may not have been an academy award contender, it was far and away better than it’s third cousin twice removed called “Bedeviled”.
The acting in this movie was just bad. I don’t know if it’s just that people are looking for their big break or what the deal is but when you see kids in their late teens and early 20’s acting like kids in their late teens and early 20’s, I don’t know why there’s such a disconnect. “So in this scene we want you to say and do this” and just no one fires back and says “Yeah, as someone in my late teens and/or early 20’s I would NEVER act like that”. It doesn’t add realism. It completely takes you out of the movie. There’s nothing about any of the performances that seems like it’s what any of these kids would do if this were a real thing. And that’s not to lend credibility to kids in their late teens and early 20’s. Most of them are dumber than a bag of hammers. So to see how much further they take this, I just don’t understand how they can’t even pretend to be themselves with any integrity. The whole thing is constantly over the top while simultaneously being underwhelming. Its the kind of thing you’d imagine someone would put together if the only impression they ever had of people was from watching reruns of 90’s sitcoms. The cheesiness of how these kids acted in literally every scene was just the worst. It was dialed up to 11 all the time.
So usually I can take all that with a grain of salt because the teenagers are supposed to be there to die. Many times I’m trying to figure out who might live through to the end but often I find myself giving in to whoever the antagonist is and just giving them immediate permission to destroy everyone as quickly as possible. When there’s nothing redeeming about any of the characters, it’s hard to root for anyone. In a Jason movie, especially in later episodes, this is at least partially by design. If the goal becomes to root for the villain then we want Jason to start chopping heads off and we cheer when he does. It’s a weird dichotomy that horror movies tends to create in this. But this sort of levels out the playing field so no matter the outcome, the viewer is still kind of satisfied. The kids win and they don’t suck? Great! Good guys win! Freddy wins but all the kids suck? Yay! Shorter lines at the waterslide next time I’m there! In the end, it’s a zero sum game and the audience still wins out. That’s not to say that Friday the 13th part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is a good movie. It’s not. But in the end there’s still a means by which you can satisfy that itch that a horror movie represents. At the end of Bedeviled, you’re just angry. You want everyone dead but you also want the shitty villain to die too because he’s just so useless. Many times I thought I was in a Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey cutaway where one of the characters was facing a personal fear. That would make sense. For one kid they gave him the generic fear of clowns through a dramatically difficult scene to watch. Two of the male leads were “secretly” filming the other male lead as he watched a youtube video all the way up until a scary clown nurse popped on screen and “scared’ him. “Hey you jokesters! You know how much I don’t like clowns!” Oh good. That’s his fear de jour. So they at least held to that. But to the best of my knowledge, they didn’t introduce this for anyone else. So when fear came to haunt each of the other kids, they were taunted by apparitions that made NO sense whatsoever. I literally questioned out loud “Why is that old lady chasing her? Is her secret fear grandmothers??” It wouldn’t have been a hard bridge to cross for each of them but the writing was just that bad and no one took the time to care. That’s truly what offends me in movies like this. It’s the lack of caring. The glaring issues in so many of these movies is not that it was made poorly. You can have a $35K budget and made one of the greatest scary movies of all time, can’t you Blair Witch Project? So it’s not a budgetary restraint every time. It’s the fact that you take a premise and set it up with shoddy foundation. That’s what becomes offensive. Write a scary movie and have a scary move fan read it and let them be honest. They’ll break down the inaccuracies real quickly. From there just find plausible ways to work that into the script. And then just hire people who can act their way out of a paper bag. I’m not saying you need Tom Cruise. Clearly he’s not fantastic in every outing. But you can find people who can act that won’t require their own luxury trailer in the budgetary constraints.
Finally, and this required it’s own acknowledgment just because, the tech jargon. I’m far from an expert when it comes to technology. I’m savvy, sure. But I’m not an expert and I wouldn’t claim to be one. In fact, it’s an imperative that I’m NOT an expert in my critique of this film. Its because I’m not that this point was so contentious. There’s one character, Cody, that is the resident “techie” of the gang. And yes, I had to look his character’s name up because I did not commit any of them to memory. The problem is that there did not seem to be any experts of any kind that reviewed any part of this script. I honestly feel like someone literally Googled “Tech words” and peppered them liberally throughout his dialogue. It’s always tricky when you’re dealing with having to try and figure out the weaknesses of a demonic cell phone app. I don’t really know if Satan knows how to code or not. Perhaps he outsources that. Regardless, in order to come up with some feasible way of ridding the remaining friends of this evil application, we have to figure out how it works and that’s why Cody was in this movie. Honestly even as I accidentally misspelled his name just a minute ago I started to vomit in my mouth a little at the notion they may have named him Cody because it sounds like code-y. I don’t know that to be true but I would not put it past these people. But his dialogue reminded me of a failing open mic night comedian desperately clawing his way through what a mechanic sounds like only using buzz words to try and connect with the audience via the shared ignorance the general public typically has in automotive know how. Cody simply injects every 4th word he says with a prefix of “micro” and then trails off with one of the article titles in a current computer magazine to make it sound like he knows what he’s talking about. Then let him sit in front of a laptop and furiously pound away at the keys while not showing his hands at all and he’s a apple genius. It was really obnoxious to listen to him talk because he said it with such authority and it never sounded like he had any idea of what he was talking about. Even when they employed his computer program in the end to uninstall the app it was pure ridiculousness. I just needed to really notate how annoying this aspect of the movie was. Again, it boils down to creating a problem they didn’t have a way to fix other than using mindless tech speak. It’s sloppy writing and it shows you don’t care.
Realistically this movie is just an F. There’s some jump scares and I’m sure the guy who made this movie has a mom who is really proud of how creative he always was as a youth. But outside of those stunning features, this is 90 minutes of my life that’s just spent on this silly little pursuit. I know some of these movies are going to be duds. I don’t often truly plan to be scared. But even when they’re bad I still hope there’s some means by which I can entertain myself. This movie is just garbage all the way around. And it never dedicates itself to being anything. So it’s just a cash grab at a shitty sub-genre of shitty horror movies. Teenagers will watch it and think it’s scary and that’s where it should be relegated to. It should be on a streaming service that is only available to vapid teenagers that only watch movies on their phones. Nowhere outside of that venue should this movie be watchable for other humans. That is all. So until next time, I’ll catch you on the flip side.
