Unboxed (I) (2022) User Reviews

Difficult to watch

[jdollak · 3/10 · 17 May 2023]

Hard to watch, but not for the reasons you would expect.

I watched this over several sittings, since it just couldn't keep me focused. But I was still engaged with the general premise.

A social media influencer is doing a livestream while her friend is held captive by a villain. The villain instructs the influencer via text message, and if she doesn't do what he wants, he'll harm the friend.

That's a decent premise. Where the movie suffers is in the writing and the acting.

I'm willing to forgive acting, since this is clearly cheap, and made using whatever friends were available.

The writing is a problem. But again, it's not just the lines. It's actually the way that the story is developed.

Our protagonist has some major problems as a character. First, she's nice and plain. She's supposed to be an influencer. She needs to be charismatic. She needs to be exciting. Why would people be watching her livestream if she's just a nice little nobody?

Second, as a protagonist, she's passive. She obeys her commands without question, she doesn't try to solve her problem. The result is a story that turns into a gross-out comedy, where she rubs crap on her face and eats a raw fish. Her decisions have no consequences, because she's just agreeing to keep doing this.

Pacing is poor, since the actors seem to mostly be family and friends.

There's the "twist" ending, which is mostly forseeable. The killer makes an appearance, and it's mostly obvious who he is, and our protagonist comes across as a moron for not spotting it.

It's bad... but on the technical side, it's completely watchable. On the screenwriting side... more thought was needed.

Low Budget but Entertaining

[Mysticannie30 · 3/10 · 24 April 2024]

The film is around an hour and 12 minutes, and it was mildly entertaining. It had a reasonable pace, with a suitable crescendo in plot but lacked acting skills and creativity. It was a bit silly at times, and also laughable, but not the worst thing I've seen. It is centred around a young woman who is trying to make it big in the social media world. With her manager putting pressure on her to land this big sponsor contract, Laura films a live show on Halloween, opening boxed gifts sent to her by her fans and sponsors. However, as the night draws on, and the boxes are being opened one by one, live on camera in front of thousands of viewers, things take a low budget, poorly acted turn...

I had to turn it off

[K_Rad88 · 1/10 · 20 August 2022]

The first few mins got me - and influencer gives a shallow, very fake thanks to her subscribers (it seems legit then she spits the stuff out off camera) for the gifts she receives from them, and then dies because she eats poison gummy bears someone sends her while she's live streaming. Or does she die? I dunno, they mention she just 'disappeared' even though she was foaming at the mouth like she had rabies.

Her acting was fine, but it just went downhill from here....

The acting of all the other cast members was SO BAD. It was like they were reading their lines directly off the screen. The sound was also all over the place. Someone would speak and it would be turned up so loud, and the others were normal volume standing right next to the loud one. Like their mics didn't work.

Do not recommend, I think I lasted maybe 10 mins tops.

I don't normally like to rip on student projects with $100 budget but...

[twesterm-10433 · 1/10 · 13 August 2022]

I feel like it's fine to make a movie that has been done to death but if you do decide to do that you should make sure to do it well. Unboxing is a movie that feels like it's a student project made on a weekend with about $100 to spend and does nothing well.

The acting is pretty terrible across the board, some of it you might expect to see better in middle school theater. Laura, the main character, probably does the best but even she is not good at all. She kiiiind of starts selling it at the end of the movie, but the rest of the time she's just kind of...not there. Just vapid streamer. Special shoutout to the other end of the acting spectrum, Eddie del Carmen for possibly some of the worst acting I've ever seen in a movie. I guess that might be ok to be that bad of an actor if he were a better writer/director, but, well...

Of course it's hard to blame these actors when the roles you're playing don't actually have any character. It's a stretch to even call some of the main characters cliches. Laura has the most depth of any of the characters and it her entire character goes only as deep as "girl who is an influencer." The rest are typical stoner boyfriend, shy nerdy kid who wants the girl, and finally "friend". Oh yeah, and influencer agent who wants her high school client to dress sexier.

Aside from the characters and acting, the camera work is bad. The editing is bad. The music is bad. The dialogue is bad. The story is bad. Just bad all around.

So what is this movie?

This movie centers around Laura, a high school girl who is some sort of professional mak-eup streamer/influencer. She actually has an agent and everything, an agent so devoted to her that she sits in her office during Halloween to watch her client. So Laura gets all sorts of influencer gifts and giveaways, a completely professional setup, has thousands of viewers and has even hit more than 1,000,000 views but she is just a terrible streamer. Zero personality, zero interesting to say. Maybe that's what people look for in a streamer? I don't know.

Anyways, it's Halloween night and instead of going to the final part of the year (yes, her friends make sure to tell her it's the final party of the year even though it's only Halloween) she's doing the worlds worst live stream. She soon starts getting blackmailed into doing increasingly worse things on stream for the enjoyment of some random person. They never really bother explaining why this person does what they do...they just kind of do it? Motives are for losers.

Where was I? Oh right, bad movie. Laura does the things, killer starts upping the ante. You've seen this movie 100 times probably and you've definitely seen it done better. I'd like to at least give the people in this movie credit for trying hard but I don't think they even did that. The best thing I can say about the movie is it's only 73 minutes. Skip this movie.

somehow I watched the whole thing

[thelagarcia · 1/10 · 22 February 2023]

The first few minuets it does seem like a movie that could be worth watching. Those few minuets have the best acting in the whole movie. Why the killer targets the person in the opening of the movie is never even hinted at nor why he targets the women the rest of the movie follows. In that sense it seems like no one finished writing this movie and they made it anyway. I was OK with watching a independently made low budget movie but the dialogue, acting, sound, editing and story line just kept me from being able to enjoy this movie. The people bringing trick or treaters to the women's door have the most unnatural dialogue and acting. There is one scene where the lead actress is reaching for a knife on the floor and for some reason has her back to the knife and is using the camera on her phone to see where she is reaching behind her for the knife. There may have been some reason for her to do that but its not in the movie. She then turns around facing the knife and uses her eyes to see the knife and pick it up. That is in the movie so why was that scene of her reaching behind her and using the phone to see where she was reaching included? It makes no sense. The same scene a close up of the women's face and then cuts to a wider shot with the hallway behind her and the two images of the women just aren't in the same or very similar lighting. Her face does not look the same in the two shots to the point that it could be a different actress. The movie cuts between the two shots a few time. So many moments like that in this movie kept me from being able the suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy this movie at all. I should have turned it off but I watched the whole thing. Of all the feature length movies I have ever seen this is the only one that I wish I had not.

Just the molly talking

[nogodnomasters · 1/10 · 8 August 2022]

The film opens with a vlogger (Paulina Sofia) dying on air from eating a poisoned gummy bear or someone placed an Alka Selter in her mouth when she went off camera. Our attention turns to Laura (Katherine Diaz) who has a Vlog, LaLa Place because LaLa Land has been done and was over rated. Laura gets text messages on her phone which she must obey or else Blake (a friend) gets it.

The film was short. It was low budget as most of these filming of computer screens and people online tend to be. Not much in the way of gore or horror. Characters were shallow. Was this a college project? Filming was done in about 7 days. I have to ask, "Why so long?"

Guide: No F-word, sex, or nudity.

If This is What Millennials Find Entertaining...

[rebeltaz-18705 · 1/10 · 26 September 2022]

I watched thirty minutes of this drivel before I could not take any more. I thought that this was supposed to be a horror picture, but the first two deaths were completely boring. The first girl is poisoned with jelly beans and the next one was poisoned by a vape pen.

I knew I wasn't going to like this from the beginning, though. It starts with some "influencer" making a video for her followers and.. yeah, she's as fake as you would expect.

Then we sit through a meeting of what look like professionals who are actually just more millennials planning on how to make other "influencers" "stars."

The main girl (I assume) is talking to her boyfriend and he offers to walk her home and they head off together. Next thing we see, she's walking u her street by herself with no boyfriend to be seen. Excellent continuity editing, right there... /s

She is another so-called "influencer" and we see her getting set up for her next live stream. As time passes, we are shown place cards announcing the upcoming stream in fluttering, cutesy text. The point at which I said enough is enough, though was when the girl started arranging the "gifts" from her sponsors on the table. This was literally a five minute scene of just her moving the same boxes around over and over, all set to a hypnotic, monotonous beat.

The acting is abysmal. The dialog is forced and unnatural. The characters are annoying. The only positive thing I can say about this is that, unlike the rest of what comes out today, this was actually well lit. It's sad when THAT is the highlight of a movie!

If you have no use for anti-social media or the kind of people who do, do yourself a favor and stay far away from this waste of digital film.