You can’t trust anyone online these days, which might explain why there are two horror films titled Friend Request. But there’s one thing you can trust online, and it’s that I’ll tackle dumb blog themes like comparing two horror movies with the title Friend Request…
FRIEND REQUEST (2013)
The mainstream commercial release I’ll get to next may be the one everyone knows, and may be the only reason people accidentally watch this one. However, this one came out three years before.
It’s also a totally different plot. A masked psycho is friending people online, arranging to meet up with them, and then maiming them something awful WITHOUT killing them!
A burned out detective is put on the case with a new, young, pretty female partner. They are immediately at odds with each other as they go around investigating each non-kill.
This is a rinse and repeat flick. Someone gets a message, goes to meet the online hookup, gets abducted, receives awful torture we don’t get to see inflicted, and is then questioned in the hospital by the detectives.
The most intriguing confrontation between non-killer and victim has the non-killer assuming some pervy old dude is actually a closet case and forcing him to watch gay porn before shooting off his dick. And wouldn’t you know that’s the one case the main detective finds to be a big joke when he questions the witness the next day.
Dammit, daddy! Stop resisting. Look and turn gay for me!
Friend Request 2013 feels like one of those direct-to-video, no thrills thrillers from the 90s in which famous faces from the 80s were cast to milk the last drops of their name recognition. Oh. Did I mention Brat Packer Anthony Michael Hall plays the burned out detective and 80s hunk Martin Kove plays his boss?
FRIEND REQUEST (2016)
Considering the competition, I guess Friend Request 2016 is the winner of this battle of the same name horror movie blog game.
Alycia Debnam-Carey of Fear the Walking Dead stars as a college student who is suddenly the obsession of a weird girl she friends online. When the weird girl gets stalkerish, AD-C has to unfriend her.
But she can’t. Horrific videos start getting posted to her social media and can’t be deleted. The weird girl can’t be unfriended.
And then ADC’s friends begin to die…and their death videos also end up on her social media.
It’s so derivative, it’s so American horror ripping off Asian horror circa 2005, but it’s fun and creepy for quite a while, complete with Ring-style videos.
There’s even a hunt for a mirror that’s right out of the mirror in The Ring video, which is supposed to be the key to stopping the madness.
It’s this hunt that sends this film off the rails and crashing into the same heap pile as all the other mainstream films just like it. In other words, the dwindling number of survivors runs all over the fricking place to the point that it stops being scary, I can’t follow it, I stop caring, I stop paying attention, and it’s predictable. Yes, I can’t follow it and I stop paying attention yet I still know how it’s all going to turn out.
