UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB
When I was a kid one of my biggest fears was walking down the horror section aisle in the video store. Nothing chilled me to my core quite like taking a wrong turn in a VideoEzy. I knew that if I saw a creepy cover on a VHS my sleeps would be done for a week. I didn’t know that most of the movies behind those covers were absolute goofery because my imagination filled in the blanks. I was, clinically speaking, chicken shit.
I sometimes will have that same feeling when seeing a particularly creepy movie poster. The Unfriended movies did that for me. Especially the sequel Dark Web. It’s a creepy poster. You can scroll down and see for yourself. Scroll back up. Creepy right? Yikes! Really hides the fact that this is a daft movie that takes place entirely on somebody’s computer screen where we see the characters interaction via video chat, messenger and all the other apps and windows you might see somebody use on their screen. There are some jump scares but most of the time Unfriended is as scary as looking over somebody’s shoulder at their laptop screen.
The Unfriended movies are always about a group of pals who Skype with each other until one by one they’re killed off. In the first Unfriended it was by the evil spirit of a girl they bullied, and in Dark Web it’s by a mysterious group called The Circle, a group of cybercriminals who play games with people’s lives. The series jumps from ghosts who know how to use WhatsApp to a secret society who kill people over FaceTime.
I always found the biggest suspension of disbelief required with these movies was in the idea that any group of friends would get together and hang out over video chat for so long. These movies were made in 2014 and 2018 and I could buy that there was a poltergeist poking you on Facebook before I bought that anybody would spend that amount of time on a video call. These movies have, unfortunately, aged quite well. They need a new Unfriended where a cyber-goblin starts terrorizing everybody involved in a Zoom comedy show.
How would I be a part of Unfriended: Dark Web? Due to the current state of the world we’ve had to record the podcast I co-host, Oooh, Spooky and 25 Days(LISTEN NOW WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS) over the internet and we had huge problems on one of the recent episodes. My internet kept stuffing up and freezing and I cut out completely and I had to restart my router and that didn’t really fix it and I bet that if I was in Unfriended I might run into a similar issue.
IF I WERE IN 'UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB' I WOULD: DO WHAT I DID WHILE WRITING THIS NEWSLETTER, GET DISTRACTED TRYING TO FIGURE OUT IF COMEDIAN VINCE SORRENTI VOICED THE AQUADUCK. GOOGLE’S RESULTS REVEALED NOTHING.
