Movie Review: ‘ANTISOCIAL’

Social networks, guys. They’re a thing. You got your Twitters, your Facebooks, your Instagrams, etc. They sure do have a big impact on our lives, don’t they? Not really. There will come a time when the Facebook generation has the stage and I’m sure, by then, we’ll see the world of social networks bleeding into reality. As of right now, the worst that can happen is you lose your job. If you’re particularly stupid, you can be “catfished” but honestly, people who fall for that kinda deserve it. There’s a lot of fear-mongering with social networks, people talking about privacy violation, etc. What really annoys me about that kind of attitude is how blindly entitled it is. You signed up to interact with other people on a website. The moment you click accept (especially if you didn’t read the fine print), you should pretty much assume anything you post is free game, even if said website promises it isn’t.

If you want to maintain a level of privacy you’re comfortable with, DON’T USE FACEBOOK. If you don’t want to get fired from your job for saying stupid things on Twitter, DON’T USE TWITTER. It’s not that hard. Sure, it seems like that’s awful extreme but, really, it’s not. 90% of the time, social networks exist strictly to kill time. Rarely do you use them to actually organize events or have important interactions, though I’m sure this doesn’t hold as true with younger people. Regardless, I approach ANY movie that is about “social networks” with low expectations and more than a bit of cynicism. And a movie called “ANTISOCIAL” is a very special case.

The prologue sets up the tone for the rest of the film and features the annoying lo-def “webcam” POV, focusing on two girls streaming video to a generic Facebook-esque social network. One girl becomes sick, then violent, and the other murders her in self defense. If it’s not a hair dryer she uses as a bludgeon, it sure as hell looks like one and even if it wasn’t, the whole scene is just so hilariously fake I actually laughed. Not an auspicious beginning.

From that point on, we’re introduced to a series of characters representing the worst of horror stereotypes; survivor girl, sexy girl, doomed hunk, black guy and geek misfit. Seriously, there’s nothing about these characters that breaks them out of said roles in any way. And it’s played dead straight. They’re all brought together by a New Year’s Eve party, organized via aforementioned social network. We witness the heroine having her heart broken, again on said social network, and it’s pretty obvious exactly what important thing she was trying to tell her now ex-boyfriend before he dumped her, but naturally, when the reveal lands, it has no real significance to the plot, other than to try and indict social networks for making dumping people easier.

The first of many annoying cliches has black guy and sexy chick hook up at the party, of course. Fortunately, it’s interrupted by a violent intruder who is promptly dispatched, by accident. Surprisingly, most of the partygoers are smart enough to not panic, even as the misfit is discovering that tons of similar attacks are going down all over the world. They get wise and board the place up, even though the real threat is right in front of their eyes in the form of the social network feeding them updates about the growing menace. Something inside the website itself triggers surprisingly stomach-turning hallucinations, apparently heralding the inevitable transformation into murdering monster, though monsters not smart enough to use weapons.

One of my biggest complaints is that we never actually see what the “infected” DO to their victims. For the most part, the ones we see just do a lot of grabbing and throwing and getting blood on people before being killed. There’s no real sense of danger from them, given how easily defeated they are and there doesn’t seem to be any function to their behavior. But the screenwriters avert this problem (unintentionally) by making the virus the real threat, as one by one, the characters turn on each other. Except that we don’t care about these characters anyway, so I found myself more cheering each character death, which all come pretty predictably. Naturally, the black guy dies first.

There’s an interesting subtext to the online video chats between the misfit and a friend elsewhere. Said friend has a bit of a flamboyant manner and the misfit’s interactions with him seem more concerned than those of the people he’s trapped with. So naturally, when his friend kills himself escaping the infected (in a scene that’s, again, more funny than frightening), the misfit becomes hysterical and stupid, even though several friends have already died RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM. If we’re not supposed to draw the obvious conclusion that they have a relationship beyond friendship, then I don’t know what to make of it. Regardless, it’s both an interesting facet but simultaneously a stumble for the writers.

[toggle title=”Spoiler Section (Expand at Your Own Risk!)”]As the body count rises, the world outside descends into chaos and the survivors inside the house dwindle, the truth is revealed about the “infected”; they’re actually the result of a program embedded in the social network everyone’s on, designed to keep people addicted to the site but inadvertently causing them to develop a tumor-like organ in their brain that’s somehow connected to the program itself. On the one hand, it’s a pretty stupid explanation that serves as a welcome reminder that explaining things usually kills what little suspense a horror film like this might have. On the other hand, it’s also a veiled and justified criticism of how sites like Facebook and Twitter will do pretty much anything to insure that their users stay connected, at the expense of the users themselves. But rather than seeming thoughtful, the context of the criticism is overcooked and laughably nonsensical.

The movie just gets more grim at the climax, as the infected hunk tries some home surgery to save the heroine but succumbs anyway, leaving her to do the job herself. It’s probably the only really cringe-worthy moment in the whole film but the implausibility rises to hilarious levels when she proceeds to defend herself from attack IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS.[/toggle]

Never has a film tried so hard, yet failed so utterly. The only saving grace of ANTISOCIAL are the unsettling body horror moments, probably because they’re so out of place. ANTISOCIAL’s biggest sin is being so unrepentantly serious, it’s almost as though they’re trying, on purpose, to play foil to the cadre of self-aware horror filmmakers coming from Canada, where the film also came from. Even the film’s visuals are so perpetually washed-out and bleak that it’s hard to care after a while. The script is actually good and there’s some surprisingly strong performances from the cast but there’s just nothing fun at all about this movie and nothing particularly scary, either. That said, there’s probably a market for this among high schoolers fixated on Facebook and selfies who were spooked by ‘Paranormal Activity’.