Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Today's been a rollercoaster of a Day 1 of SXSW 2015. My day began in earnest with a stopoff at the Mondo Gallery for a sneak peak at Jason Edmiston's show.
I'm a huge fan of Jason Edmiston's work and this Mondo gallery show was pretty unique in that Mondo was not offering up any prints at the show. Not a one. This was all wholly Edmiston's original art and he had a crazy amount of art there.
The idea was that he'd do a ton of 1:1 scale paintings of famous pop culture eyes. How cool could that be, you ask? Really, really, really damn cool. Let's look at some:
Keep in mind, the above represents maybe 50% of the gallery. Naturally, I appreciated that he went for Temple of Doom-era Indiana Jones. And, of course, I was giddy that he made a Mola Ram piece, too.
As I was wandering around, checking out these awesome pieces and testing my own movie/TV knowledge along the way, I ended up seeing one of his pieces set up in a peculiar way... It was facing a mirror. Let's see if you can guess whose eyes you might not want to stare directly into...
That's right, it's Ray Harryhausen's own interpretation of Medusa. This right here is why I love the Mondo guys. It's an awesome piece displayed even more awesomely. And Medusa wasn't the only one repping Clash of the Titans at the gallery...
But there was one undisputed king of the gallery. Remember when I said these pieces were all 1:1 scale? That means when you take on King Kong you're not going to fuck around. Edmiston did a piece that ended up over 7ft long and 3ft wide and it was goddamn beautiful. I've included two photos below, one of the piece straight on and one with some of the other pieces in it to give it some scale.
It was a great show and one that made me wish I was made of money. There was a Bruce/Jaws one that I couldn't even bear to take a photo of because I knew it'd break my heart every time I looked back on it.
After paying the Mondo folks a visit (and unsuccessfully trying to sneak out with a bunch of Edmiston's art stuffed under my shirt) I headed down to the S. Lamar for my first official SXSW screening, the new Blumhouse release UNFRIENDED.
This tale of supernatural revenge via MacBook Pro admittedly leans heavily on gimmick, but in this day and age of found footage horror that's not exactly out of the ordinary. The concept of a horror story told 100% on the computer/over Skype isn't new. Open Windows plays with the conceit and Joe Swanberg's V/H/S segment is exactly that, but shorter.
The one thing Unfriended has over both is its roots in social commentary. Open Windows isn't the best example for comparison because it's a thriller with different aims, but Swanberg's V/H/S entry works. The goal there was to take up 15-20 minutes of an anthology and just be creepy. Throw in some messed up images, creepy sounds and a jump scare or three and you're good to go.
That wouldn't really sustain a feature length story, not without something substantial at its core and while the word substantial might not be my exact phrasing for Unfriended it does base its mythology in today's internet shaming culture. The supernatural element at play is a girl who killed herself after being embarrassed and trolled online when a video of her drunken night at a party is uploaded to social media.
All this is set up that we only see via the eyes of our lead (Shelley Hennig). She was BFFs with the departed Laura Barnes (Heather Sossaman) and is spending the anniversary of her death thinking back on her old friend thanks to the everything-at-your-fingertips internet miracle we have today.
She scans Facebook, alternates songs on her iTunes, looks at articles and even some of the video surrounding the public suicide before she starts Skyping with her boyfriend. Pretty soon it's a mutli-channel chat that involves her close circle of friends and a strange unknown user that they can't seem to boot out of the call.
It should be no surprise that poor Laura Barnes isn't resting in peace and is using the very same technology that drove her to a violent end to exact some form of revenge.
It sounds silly and it is, but while I was expecting my eyeballs to roll out of their sockets with that premise, I have to say that it rang true to what my day to day life is like, how I dig up information and chat with my friends and co-workers.
The information dumps (otherwise known as exposition scenes) are very cleverly handled. When Laura starts sending Facebook messages to her living best friend the group naturally thinks some asshole has hacked the account and make a move to make it a memorial page, which requires information about the death of the individual, including a link to an obituary for proof. I have no idea if that's real or not, but it sounds legit and the article Hennig finds gives us clues to the mystery surrounding the anonymous cyber bullying incident.
One of the strengths of the movie is that they stick to their guns mythology-wise. They establish what the threat of Laura Barnes is, what she can do and don't break that wall. However since her ability is to command people to kill themselves (using the same verbiage that was told to her over and over again) we miss some good, old-fashioned “something's behind you!” type scares we're used to in ghost movies.
It's not a bad thing that this movie does its own thing, but there was not a key sequence that stands out to me as being the centerpiece of the movie, like the clapping game in The Conjuring or the big “oh fuck!” moment that comes at the end of every Paranormal Activity movie.
Unfriended is a very easy movie to watch and I didn't have any trouble giving myself over to the mystery. It helped that the more we learned about these guys individually the more I was rooting for the ghost.
My overall impression of the film is that it's about as good as a movie with this gimmick can be. It was smart enough to be schlock, but not scary enough to push it to the next level. My anxiety level didn't have many peaks and valleys, but since I was interested in finding out more about why the vengeful ghost is doing what she's doing at every turn I didn't miss it while watching. It's only now looking back that I wish there were some more intense moments, but I don't know how you do that without betraying the mythology they set up.
The flick comes out April 17th and it could very well be altered from the cut I saw. Jason Blum intro'd the movie and said it very much is still being played with. I know they've reshot some stuff from when Blumhouse picked it up (rumor is that it's the death scenes, which are still pretty tame all things considered), so we'll see what the final product looks like.
Time for some sleep. I get 3 hours if I get to bed right now, so I'm gonna give it a go! I'll have my review of horror-comedy The Final Girls posted up sometime tomorrow. I got a lot to say about that one.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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