Host (2020)
Unfriended Again/10
Yea, it was fine for what it was. It was wisely short (the gimmick of it being a Zoom call meant that they restricted themselves to the length of a free-edition Zoom call), which meant that it got on with stuff pretty quickly but that was actually to it's detriment. I know it's corny, but I quite like the 'Top 5 Ghosts Caught on Camera' aesthetic where you're meant to be terrified of some random object in the background of a twitch stream shifting 4 microns to the right, and I feel like this could have used a bit more of that. Instead, it's barebones intro to the cast (with some PAINFULLY obvious foreshadowing; like 'here's the girl who's obsessed with filters - WONDER WHERE THAT'S GOING, here's the girl with a pre-recorded background - WONDER WHERE THAT'S GOING etc), then they strawberry float up a seance, and it feels like barely twenty five minutes in and it's straight into demons slamming people into ceilings and setting gooseberry fool on fire. Like, I don't mind that they went balls to the wall with the supernatural stuff but a little bit of build up wouldn't have hurt.
The fact that it's a zoom call makes some of the stuff that goes on baffling too. Like, presumably you're meant to assume that with this being a Zoom call and they all seem to be pretty fresh-out-of-uni age that they'll all be relatively tech-savvy. So it's strawberry floating baffling then that when one wants to take a screen shot, she breaks out A strawberry floating POLAROID to take a PHOTO OF THE SCREEN. It's literally nonsense except as obvious foreshadowing to
another 'I need to use the flash to momentarily light up a dark room because I am very sensible' jumpscare.
Also, given the brevity of the runtime, there's also little to no actual story. There's hints at there being more going on in the background, and I've seen movies where a lack of explanation of what's going on has really worked, but it just makes this feel empty. You get the sense that there's tensions in the group of friends, but none of them are given time to breathe meaning that certain payoffs don't hit home. Which is a shame because they weren't a bad cast, but it's strawberry floating hilarious about halfway through when a guy who leaves the call very early on due to plot convenience reasons rejoins and I swear it's just;
It almost feels like there was a much longer story planned for a feature length movie, but once the script was written they had the idea of running with the Zoom gimmick and needed to massively cut down the runtime, so it cut all the payoffs for the subtle character setups, and presumably the full explanation of
who 'Jack' the demon was (I'm calling it now, there's a version of the script somewhere where Jemma wasn't lying about 'Jack' who killed himself and it actually is his spirit doing things). Again, I don't need every character to have a wiki page of backstory, and I don't really need 45 minutes of who Haley was trying to contact or why Ridina was fighting with her boyfriend, but certain plot developments and character interactions depended on those things being important and we don't know what they were.
That said, it's not all bad. It was short, which meant it didn't outstay its welcome. It's surprisingly brutal in some places. And there was precisely one set piece that was, to my knowledge, genuinely original and took advantage of the Zoom gimmick really well. But other than that, it's basically Unfriended with all the story stripped out (and it's not exactly like Unfriended was swimming in it). Fun enough background nonsense, but there's nothing here that would change your mind if you're not a horror fan.