Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		1.5

Chain Letter Blu-ray Movie Review

Just pray no one forwards you this film.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater January 26, 2011

No kidding, I once got an honest-to-goodness snail-mail chain letter that claimed I would die by decapitation in a freak accident—Final Destination style—if I didn’t forward it on to ten friends. Needless to say, I’m still waiting for the rogue shard of glass, boat propeller mishap, or katana-slip that will do me in. But since the advent of the internet, the chain letter has evolved and become much less threatening, if still entirely obnoxious. First it morphed into the e-mail forwarding of stupid jokes and cloyingly inspirational stories about brave firemen, dying children, lost puppies, or the Founding Fathers. (At least, these are the ones my aunt, to this day, still sends me.) Its current incarnation, no less annoying, are the copy this message on your wall to show you support (fill in the blank)-type status updates that clog up your Facebook “news” feed and prompt you to justifiably delete the posters from your friends list. The impetus, behind every iteration of this social phenomenon, is that we’re all connected via the “six degrees of separation”—or, “Kevin Bacon”—effect. Technology has made this increasingly more visible—and, oooohhhh, potentially dangerous—a fact exploited rather gracelessly by Chain Letter, an inept and illogical new horror film from writer/director Deon Taylor.

So, here’s the bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping premise of this depressingly hackneyed high school slasher flick: a disgruntled neo-Luddite and former Y2K cult member is sending out chain texts/e-mails to suburban teenaged idiots and then killing them with, yes, an actual chain—a stroke of bafflingly stupid literalism—if they fail to forward the message to five friends. What’s a Luddite doing sending e-mails and tracking cell phones with a “GPS virus,” you rightfully ask? I don’t know. Neither does the film, which doles out a lame, plot hole-covering excuse about the killer “fighting fire with fire” that makes no sense whatsoever. Likewise, we’re never given any indication of what the killer expects to do if/when challenged with an exponentially rising number of technology-using teens in need of offing. Come on, do the math! I expect low-budget genre movies like this to be formulaic, stuffed full of been-done-to-death twists, and populated by uni-dimensional cardboard characters, but is it too much to ask for some sense of rationality or at least a semblance of cogent screenwriting? I guess so. Taylor’s script, developed with the help of two co-writers, lacks even the most rudimentary elements of good storytelling. It doesn’t even have a proper ending. Oh, the film eventually stops—thank goodness—but there’s no dramatic arc here at all. The narrative just up and quits during the rising action portion of the plot, having long given up on trying to make any sense of the mess that it’s made. Ill-defined motivations and chasm-like gaps in common sense abound.

The characters are made up of your average array of disposable horror movie fodder. (Played by your average array of disposable twentysomething actors.) First, there’s Boy With Glasses, a World of Warcraft-trolling dweeb who inadvertently sets off this whole “chain” of events—ba dum ching!—when he smartly opens a mysterious attachment from a random stranger he meets online. Good going, kid. Then, amongst others too ancillary to mention, there’s Hot Jock, a juicer who gets his face sliced in thirds, Token Black Guy—no explanation necessary—and Slutty Blond, who solicits pics of "you know what" from eager online boy-toys and takes candle-lit baths with the windows open while our hulking killer lurks in the backyard. Naturally, the camera gets to linger gratuitously on her perky breasts a mere minute before—surprise!—her head is cleaved nearly in two. Groundbreaking stuff, folks. While Detective Jim Crenshaw (Keith David) combs the town for clues and tracks down potential suspects, including Brad Dourif as creepo teacher Mr. Smirker, whip smart student Jessie Campbell (Twilight’s Nikki Reed) does some sleuthing of her own, arriving at the conclusion that the only way to avoid the killer’s curse is to—wait for it—turn off all of your online devices. Clever girl. Crazy/sexy Chinese actress Bai Ling is also top-billed here, but I honestly can’t even recall who she plays, which should give you some indication as to how unmemorable the characters are.

Even gorehounds looking for little more than a shallow bloodbath will be disappointed. The gory, over-the-top kills are executed competently, but they’re nothing new, not to mention entirely joyless and way too obvious. Let’s see, there’s a kid working on his car, and the engine is suspended— yep, by chains—from the ceiling of the garage. I wonder…might the chains suddenly snap while this innocent would-be mechanic has his head under the motor, inspecting a leak that looks conspicuously like blood? The grimly predictable proceedings will never scare you stiff, but the film’s style- over-substance editing techniques and instantly dated cultural references might numb you into near catatonia. Do we really need to visually enter a spiraling network of binary numbers and electronic synapses whenever one of the dumbass kids deletes the chain letter? Need the image go into “Earthquake Cam” mode every time the killer is about to strike? What’s with the clunky, 2006-era flip phones these kids are using? And did somebody mention MySpace?

Note: While the “Unrated” version of the film is available on DVD, this Blu-ray release is stuck with the plain old Rated-R cut for some reason. Not that you’re missing much, I’m sure.

Chain Letter Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Chain Letter links onto Blu-ray with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that certainly reflects the film's budget. Whether the movie was shot on film or video is hard to tell—I'm leaning toward video—but either way you slice it, the image is cluttered with a patchy mixture of compression artifacts and noise/grain. Like most horror films, the color palette here is intentionally dreary and dim—cold and lifeless would be one way to put it—which only exacerbates the fact that black levels, in the darkest scenes, are murky and grayish, crushing shadow detail and appearing wishy-washy simultaneously. Clarity, as you might expect, is inconsistent. There are tight close-ups which reveal finely tuned facial texture—Brad Dourif's visage is as craggy as ever— but also lots of soft, slightly smeary shots. Still, come on, I don't think anyone was really expecting Chain Letter to be a stunner in the visuals department, right? It's passable for what it is.

Chain Letter Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Despite some gimmicky sound design and a slightly low vocal mix, the film's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is—to be generous—better than merely adequate. The track's dynamic range and clarity aren't exactly exemplary, but the LFE channel does kick in for occasional low-end oomph and high-end sounds like clinking chains clatter clearly. (Apologies for the excessive and unintentional alliteration.) Likewise, the rear speakers may not be utilized consistently, but they get plenty of action, from atmospheric ambience, like heavy rain and rolling thunder, to disembodied media voices stylistically circling the soundfield, intoning ominously about, I dunno, identity theft or whatever. As I mentioned, dialogue sometimes sounds a bit low, but never to the point of distraction or unintelligibility. English SDH and Spanish subtitles are available in clean white lettering for those that need them.

Chain Letter Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

All you'll find here is a two-minute standard definition trailer.

Chain Letter Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Forget scraping the bottom of the barrel for horror movie plots—this one has overturned the barrel to see if there are any new ideas underneath. There aren't. Owing to my line of work, I'm subjected to quite a few utterly awful slashers each year, but Chain Letter might just be the worst example of its genre I've seen in ages. Take a cue from the film's neo-Luddite themes: if you're tempted to watch this nonsense—and I mean literal nonsense—just turn off the TV.