Friend Request ** (2016, Alycia Debnam-Carey, William Moseley, Connor Paolo, Brit Morgan, Brooke Markham, Sean Marquette) – Movie Review

Alycia Debnam Carey stars as attractive, confident and popular college student Laura, who naturally has many, many friends, both on and off line. She’s our heroine and she is also a rather nice person and so takes pity on a lonely student (Liesl Ahlers) and friends her on Facebook, till she discovers how weird her on-line art is, and then finds the girl is cyberstalking her.

When Laura unfriends the mysterious Marina on-line, the girl commits suicide. But then Laura finds herself fighting a demonic presence that wants to make her lonely by killing one by one all her closest friends Kobe, Olivia, Isabel and Gustavo (Connor Paolo, Brit Morgan, Brooke Markham, Sean Marquette), as well as her boyfriend Tyler (William Moseley).

Director Simon Verhoeven’s 2016 teen horror movie Friend Request is very slickly done and taken at a fast pace, with a shortish 90 minute running time, so it does entertain and doesn’t get boring. However, it doesn’t spend enough time building the mysterious girl character or developing having her stalk the heroine, either in cyberspace or in real space.

And, once she is a demonic presence, the film becomes silly and feels it can just say it’s a ‘supernatural’ story to disguise the fact that the story doesn’t make any sense, as the plot just degenerates into to usual teen peril/ teen killing scenario.

It’s a shame, though, because it starts intriguingly and well, and the smart production with imaginative graphics is a strong asset. With its dire warning about the evils of social media and spending your whole life online, there is a really good idea in here somewhere, but this doesn’t quite get in touch with it.

That is the fault of the screenplay by Verhoeven, Matthew Ballen and Philip Koch. They have come up against the inevitable – that these teen horror thrillers are hard to do, and harder still to make fresh. You may remember, for example, that it isn’t long ago we already had Unfriended (2014).

Incidentally, as the kids are at college, is it strictly a teen movie? Or do college movies have their own genre. College horror thriller sounds a bit too posh and brainy to be a saleable quantity, but you never know.

William Moseley was born on April 27, 1987.

Moseley, famous as Peter Pevensie in the three The Chronicles of Narnia movies, was 26 at the time of filming (which ended in March 2014) and is 29 on April 27 2016 but he still looks the student part, though his American accent slips, especially when he is shouting.

Although made in Cape Town, South Africa, by German director Simon Verhoeven for German production companies, the film appears to be American and was shot in English because of the largely English-speaking cast.

Friend Request cost $9,900,000 and grossed $3,759,000 in the US.

The Chronicles of Narnia movies are The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

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© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review derekwinnert.com