5.4 | / 10 |
Users | 1.0 | |
Reviewer | 1.5 | |
Overall | 1.5 |
A group of friends from high school receive a mysterious chain letter that moves from their email accounts and text messaging to a creepy little icon that begins haunting their My Space pages. Who knew that chain letters can kill? As the friends battle the curse or a perpetrator targeting them, friendships are tested. The chain letter must be passed to the people they know best. That person must open the letter. Break the chain and a horrible death awaits you. Beat it and you just might live. Do you pass it on?
Starring: Nikki Reed, Keith David, Noah Segan, Brad Dourif, Betsy RussellHorror | 100% |
Thriller | 52% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.78:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 1.5 | |
Video | 3.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 1.5 |
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.
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.
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.
All you'll find here is a two-minute standard definition trailer.
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.
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