Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)

Directed by Stephen Susco. Starring Colin Woodell, Connor Del Rio, Rebecca Rittenhouse, Andrew Lees, Betty Gabriel, Stephanie Nogueras, Savira Windyani. [R]

More “screenlife” horror with another group of unlikable, none-too-bright young people trapped in Skype sessions while unsettling things take place which threaten their lives. Worse, because the sequel drops the supernatural “ghost in the machine” angle, the viewer is forced to take the events at face value: after taking possession of a lost-and-found laptop, Woodell stumbles across access to the dark web where the original owner, a sadistic and practically omniscient hacker, can see everything he does and threatens to kill his friends if he doesn’t give it back. As before, this gimmicky visual format doesn’t work at feature length, with extended time spent in its techno-conceit grating on the nerves (and senses) and exposing itself to too much ridicule. By the final twenty minutes or so, all sense of artificial reality is vanquished, and we’re left to watch scenarios with trivial emotional investment play out like the hypotheticals of the damned (sure, somehow we’ve got minions ready to go at a subway platform and a random hospital, and no one can stop us, bwahahaha). When writer/director Stephen Susco presented his screenplay for studio approval, did no one bother to respond, “Obvious troll is obvious”?

26/100