Ooooo! Another "found footage" style movie. This ground-breaking technique that is not at all overused in the horror genre in movies ranging from V/H/S to Paranormal Activity to Quarantine to REC to The Tunnel to Apollo 18 to Devil's Pass to Devil's Due to Grave Encounters. Nope, it's not overused at all. In fact, it seems like a great opportunity for a brand-new director to use for his debut, right?
So, the idea is that the pretty girl, played by Melanie Papalia, is a grad student who lobbies to get a grant for her senior thesis that will allow her to study the kinds of social interactions that she has online. She is only using one site, The Den, for all of this, but she pledges to be on 24/7 to get an idea of the kinds of people online at different times. The Den appears to be Chatroulette, but it also has some direct communication for a buddy list. It's unclear what her thesis actually is, why anyone would give her money for it, what her hypothesis is, what she is actually studying, how she will manage to be online 24 hours per day, what her methodology is, how much she is getting, or what her expertise with computers is.
I thought the world of cyberscares was beyond the idea that you put information into a computer and suddenly bad things could happen, as bad people are experts at computers and can make them do anything like turn on, turn off, corrupt files, wipe hard drives, instantaneously recover from violent hammerings, etc. I was wrong. Computers are little boxes that we can't understand.
The thing is that there are some technical aspects that might have been interesting if they hadn't been presented along with spooky computer hoo-ha. Instead, the whole thing comes off as unrealistic and confused. Yes, we know that the bad guy is taking over her computer to do terrible things because we see a flash of command line (what looked briefly like a simple directory listing) and EVERYONE knows that anything in a terminal has to be the devil's work (yes, I'm using command line and terminal interchangeably, and I didn't even use "terminal emulation." That should show you how upset I am about this).
Maybe this would have been better if they had shown the other side in a bit of detail. If they had said outright that the bad guy had built the site, and he was now a millionaire who had placed so little value on each user that he was going to randomly kill one every __ days. No, this isn't the actual backstory (I think) but it might have improved the film a great deal.
Direction was bad
Acting was moderate
Story was dull
Dialog was rough
Camera work was to Cinematography what Reality Show stars are to actors
1.0/5