Selfie From Hell (2018)
The employee that came in to clean the theatre once Selfie From Hell was done overheard me complain about how bad it was. He asked why I bother with these low-budget, largely unknown horror films. I always hope to find the next Blair Witch Project, Babadook or Paranormal Activity, little-budget bone-chillers that some would consider game-changers. Unfortunately what I got is a picture as bad as its title makes it sound.
When vlogger Julia (Meelah Adams) falls into an inexplicable coma, her cousin Hannah (Alyson Walker) begins receiving ominous messages from Julia’s phone. They tie back to a strange website on the dark web.
I’ve got to expand on this plot to properly convey its idiocy. While researching "the dark side" of selfies (people have accidentally died while taking them, I guess), Julia stumbled upon this freaky website in that forbidden corner of the Internet, the deep web (a real thing). 7h3blackr00m.onion houses a supernatural entity that… wants to kill her? Steal her soul? Shove her into a coma? It's unclear.
I don’t know if Hannah is supposed to be inhumanely courageous, but I’m leaning towards her surviving being born with only half a brain. When her tech-savvy buddy Trevor (Tony Giroux) INSISTS that when talking to strangers on the deep web, she never, EVER give them personal information like her name, phone number or email, what does she do? She gives F34R3473R (Fear Eater, played by Ian Butcher) her web address… which is (basically) [email protected]! This woman refuses to turn on lights even when she suspects someone's broken into her home, never second-guesses freaky messages sent from phones sent from her comatose cousin (who isn't in the hospital for some reason) and even when objects move unnaturally around her, hardly suspects something is up.
This is a confused mess of a picture that never realizes how ludicrous and non-frightening its premise is, particularly not when the “rules” of the Black Room website are explained to us. In Selfie From Hell, the thing that’ll doom you… is taking selfies! 13 to be precise. This should be a laughably easy, even if the film knew what a selfie is (HINT: if someone else is taking the picture, it’s not a selfie) but apparently Julia valued her life so little she wound up in a demon-induced coma. The whole thing feels like a parody.
Selfie From Hell implodes spectacularly with a terrible, obvious, cliched conclusion which features terrible special effects and overflows with nonsense. This is the kind of garbage that’s made by people who have no idea what "frightening" means and don’t understand normal human behavior. If Selfie from Hell doesn’t find itself on my “Worst of 2018” list, it’s because I deemed it too obscure, too pathetic for a second round of punishment. (Theatrical version on the big screen, May 6, 2018)
