Directed by Deon Taylor
Written by Diana Erwin, Deon Taylor, and Michael Pagan
Featuring Nikki Reed, Michael J. Pagan, Noah Segan, Matt Cohen, Cody Kasch, Betsy Russell, Cherilyn Wilson, Brad Dourif, Keith David, Michael Bailey Smith
There is only one appropriate response to a chain letter. Delete. Then unleash your best arsenal of curses that you picked up in the Merchant Marines against the sender.
The same applies to Chain Letter, Deon Taylor’s upcoming horror film. I use the term “film” loosely. The editing and plotting have the choppy grace of a YouTube mashup. But Chain Letter runs 90 minutes long, compounding your suffering.
Rather than watch Chain Letter, you can have the same experience for far less money and agony. Go to the seediest Starbucks in Hollywood. Find the flailing hobo with suspicious stains on his trousers. He’s on the corner, ranting. Buy him a coffee and ask his screenplay idea. He’ll have one, I assure you. There is a better-than-even chance that it will be exactly like Chain Letter.
Chain Letter is crazy hobo movie.
Start to finish, Chain Letter's story is sloppy randomness shoved along by the thinnest dramatic elements. Its marketing will have us believe that it is the story of high school students who find themselves the target of a maniacal anti-technology cult. Sent a chain letter, they have to forward it to five others within 24 hours, or gory doom will end their very, very pretty lives. That’s how we’re told the movie goes.
In wacky actuality, Chain Letter shows nothing of the sort from the spattering of rapid images it inflicts on the audience. The psycho-justice cause-and-effect process of movies with similar “do what the evil wants or die” premises, like The Ring or One Missed Call, is not in effect. One teen totally blows off the time limit and goes on to have flawless skin for most of the film. Another frantically dispatches the letter, only to get impaled. For a film about links—one action leading to another—Chain Letter has all the rhyme and reason of random pee spatters around the urinal.
The same applies to the dialogue. Screenwriters Diana Erwin and Michael Pagan cram in exposition to explain the spray of events like they were force-feeding a goose—that, and half-formed anti-technology rambling meant to supply motive. But these lines don’t seem to lead to what happens, or come from anywhere in particular. Leaps of logic or plunges into an abyss of unreasoning are what tie plot progression together. This means that even with solid performances from solid actors like Keith David and Brad Dourif, there’s no solid ground to build a story on.
Deon Taylor blows this hot air through situations so standard they probably came in cardboard boxes, giving Chain Letter the dramatic involvement of that episode of Saved By The Bell that’s always on when you can’t sleep at 2 a.m. He gives us the Walking To Class Scene to establish the high-school kid’s emotional investment. We get the Ominous Teacher Ranting Scene to set up the horror theme. There’s the Made You Look Scene, the Sexy Death Bath Scene and the Cop At Creepy Farmhouse Scene. You could smell the Xerox toner wafting from the screen, if it wasn’t buried under the aroma of burnt hair signaling the approaching aneurysm this insipid editing induced.
If there is one saving grace, it is that on occasion, the gore is meaty enough to make your Id squirm. It was refreshing when one torture-porn scene had a strapping dude get slap-chopped into a weepy heap rather than the typical writhing, nubile girl. That was novel. But for the most part, the violence is as spastic and inexplicable as everything else. What’s meant to win a horrified “Whoa, cool!” winds up with just a baffled “why the crap did that happen?”
The list of WTF goes on and on. Why all the flashbacks to scenes we’ve already seen? Where is this dark and rainy town where teens in their thirties gather to play Wii Boxing in public? Why does the rain fall on one person, but not on the one standing beside them? Why do the teens use only candles as room lighting when they know a psycho stalks them in the shadows? When will it all end?
It’s easy to compare Chain Letter to other movies about hapless teens being arbitrarily targeted by psychos with obscure motives. It is the artless gum stuck to the shoe of similarly themed—but still head-shaking silly—films like I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream. Fans of movies so bad that they make other bad movie fans start fidgeting and thinking of their bills might like it. If you enjoy crazy hobo recycled tripe with the volume cranked, go nuts and buy a ticket. Otherwise, there is nothing to be gained from Chain Letter, save a bracing realization that even such a flatulent blast of noise and images is still better than Survival of the Dead.
Rating: (2.5 out of 5):
