Vincent Winterbourne's review seems to think that fans of horror, 80's and 90's will lap this up. I'm one of those fans....but this film doesn't deserve that much praise.
Chain Letter is certainly a watchable film. It is clichéd, not hugely original and nothing none of us haven't seen before. This is another of those films that will go floating by and leave you slightly frustrated because, placed in the hands of someone else, it could have been a terrific new horror franchise. There's a good core idea - you receive a chain email/text which you must forward on or die if you don't or delete it. What do you choose to do? Ignore it and you'll meet your end via a nasty gory death by chains (and the use of chains is actually quite good). You can almost imagine, whilst watching, the film this could have been had the script been slightly more polished, a bit more time taken with character development and more confident direction.
I do applaud the filmmakers though as this isn't a big budget horror and for the most part it is an entertaining film. It has some nice ideas. Unfortunately, everything seems to be hurried. I hardly grasped who was who out of the school buddies and it seemed like the director just wanted to get on to the next murder scene or shock revelation. The writers couldn't settle on exactly what was happening. We're given details that it's a cult doing the murders yet only one guy does the killing. The cult hate technology yet that is what they use to track and kill?
It's a shame. This isn't a bad film and I would say give it a try. Could have been so much more though, especially after such a good opening.
Nice to see Keith David with a chunky(ish) role and also Brad Dourif in there too.
Chain Letter is certainly a watchable film. It is clichéd, not hugely original and nothing none of us haven't seen before. This is another of those films that will go floating by and leave you slightly frustrated because, placed in the hands of someone else, it could have been a terrific new horror franchise. There's a good core idea - you receive a chain email/text which you must forward on or die if you don't or delete it. What do you choose to do? Ignore it and you'll meet your end via a nasty gory death by chains (and the use of chains is actually quite good). You can almost imagine, whilst watching, the film this could have been had the script been slightly more polished, a bit more time taken with character development and more confident direction.
I do applaud the filmmakers though as this isn't a big budget horror and for the most part it is an entertaining film. It has some nice ideas. Unfortunately, everything seems to be hurried. I hardly grasped who was who out of the school buddies and it seemed like the director just wanted to get on to the next murder scene or shock revelation. The writers couldn't settle on exactly what was happening. We're given details that it's a cult doing the murders yet only one guy does the killing. The cult hate technology yet that is what they use to track and kill?
It's a shame. This isn't a bad film and I would say give it a try. Could have been so much more though, especially after such a good opening.
Nice to see Keith David with a chunky(ish) role and also Brad Dourif in there too.