Monday, February 21, 2011

Chain Letter (2010)

I've been looking forward to seeing this flick, although I was not too sure what to expect from it.  The subject of email chain letters is less than timely, as I think the popularity of those peaked several years ago.  Nevertheless, that is the subject of Chain Letter.  The nerdy brother of the high school princess receives a chain letter while playing World of Warcraft.  In order to irritate his sister, who is trying to force him off of the computer, he forwards the chain letter to her and her friends.

The letter states that if you don't forward the message to five people, then you will die.  While some of the teens laugh it off and delete it, others don't want to take their chances and forward it along.  Of course, this results in dozens of high schoolers receiving the chain letter.  Unfortunately, due to some sort of bug in the chain letter, the sender(s) can tell when the email has been ignored or deleted.  And what happens to the poor saps that don't forward it on?  They get killed, using, you guessed it...chains!

I thought the deaths were pretty awesome, and they were probably the highlight of this movie.  There was some considerable actors in this flick - Brad Dourif, Keith David, Betsy Russell, and Nikki Reed, but save for a relatively cool premise and some badass death scenes, this one was pretty forgettable.  The ending was pretty unclear....although I kind of got where they were headed with the anti-technology group, their methods made zero sense.  Obviously, they're trying to bank in advance by immediately setting it up for a Chain Letter 2, but let's hope they never get around to making that.

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