#Horror

There is nothing more painful than being a twelve-year-old girl. Except watching a movie about them and their social media addiction. In what is quite possibly one of the worst "horror" movies I have ever seen, today's review is the second in our line-up, "#Horror".

I hesitate to even call Tara Subkoff a horror director as she subjects her viewers to an hour and a half of tweenage girl melodrama and the scathing abuse of social media. When a group of girls gathers at twelve-year-old Sophia's (Bridget McGarry) house for a sleepover, we watch a full hour and seven minutes of relentless bullying, a flurry of picture taking, crass remarks, runway dress up, drunken dancing, and five minutes on when each girl got their period. As a male watching this alone I had to remind myself that I was watching for art's sake. It was the most uncomfortable hour and a half I've ever been subjected to.

Somewhere in this mind-numbing girl powwow, we receive a half-assed attempt at a backstory where we learn that the house belonged to a deranged artist known as Ray Jamieson, who owned the place because the four winds converged there. Yes, you read that right. Somehow this is supposed to invoke prickling horror and chilling terror, but all it ever serves as is bloated dialogue that bears no relevance to anything that comes afterward. While the girls smoke cigarettes and drink Vodka straight no chaser, depicting a typical Russian Wednesday night rather than an American girls sleepover, we see that someone is lurking about the house taking videos and snapping pictures. This person was the only true hero of the story who had the tenacity to stay and listen to what was happening inside the house. When the action finally does arrive, I despised the shallow twelve-year-olds so much that I almost clapped as the killer made his appearance.

The editing of "#Horror" is seizure-inducing and poorly executed. Many of the shots are intercut with graphics of what I can only assume to be crude renditions of what Subkoff thinks is social media. These scenes look more like the backgrounds to gaudy Vegas slot machines from the 1980s, complete with video game sound effects and for some reason a scoreboard. Sadie Seelert, playing the sullen and, of course, misunderstood Sam, and the rest of her bratty crew, including Haley Murphy as Catherine, Mina Sundwall as Francesca (who I am certain I didn't know the name of the entire movie), and the woefully pudgy Georgia, played by Emma Adler, spend most of the movie bickering with one another and determining who is in fact the meanest.

If any positives are drawn from this atrocious excuse for a horror film and believe me, I stretched to find one, it is the acting. Though the actors are young and haven't appeared in anything of relevance, their portrayal of cruel, verbally abusive, entitled twelve-year-old girls is impeccable. Then again, they could just be playing themselves.

It was a relief to see the credits begin to roll up my screen as I could then slap one star onto this film's rating. Somewhere there's a message of the negative effects of social media in this film, but that theme is soundly drowned out by the more important one, being twelve.

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