Main cast: Alyson Walker (Hannah), Tony Giroux (Trevor), Meelah Adams (Julia), Ian Butcher (F34R3473R), Tyler AH Smith (Selfieman), Shaun Morse (Dr Edwards), Matthew Graham (Dr Jonas), and Stephanie Gooden (Josephine)
Director: Erdal Ceylan
Okay, let’s see if I can make sense of the plot of this Canadian horror flick Selfie from Hell. Obviously taking its cues from Korean and Japanese horror flicks, this one has some kind of evil curse that will see a mysterious man showing up in your selfies to kill you after you’ve seen 13 selfies – a good thing this curse isn’t real, or Instagram would be a site of mass genocide by now – and somehow this curse is tied to the dark web. This dark web, mind you, is pretty easy to get access into in this movie, which has me wondering why they bother calling it such.
Anyway, Hannah gets a visit from her aunt Julia from Germany, not knowing that Julia is hounded by this curse for the dumbest of reasons. I’m not saying anything more because that will be a spoiler and saying it makes me feel even more stupid than usual. Julia soon falls into some kind of coma, leaving Hannah and some hacker kid Trevor to try to track down the reason Julia is in so much trouble. Oh, and despite Julia being in a coma, Hannah never considers calling a hospital for help. She just lets the poor dear lie on the bed like that.
I can see what this movie is trying to do. The few cheap CGI scenes it could afford are trying very hard to emulate those Ju-On movies back in those days, but the end results are just sadly goofy rather than scary. Furthermore, the whole story is just way too convoluted for its own good, with director-cum-scriptwriter Erdal Ceylan being far more intent on cramming as many Korean and Japanese horror tropes as possible into this movie even if his method of doing so rarely made sense. Then, maybe because it’s cheaper that way, the movie is further crammed with lazy jump scares in order to stretch out the film and deliver the scares.
The tragedy here is that, despite all these efforts, Selfie from Hell still manages to be a boring, tedious watch. That’s what happens when a horror movie serves up predictable, lazy jump scares instead of making the effort to earn the scares, and it’s easier to lose interest in the already boring film when the story makes little sense. Oh, and the acting is wooden all around too from the cast of mostly no-name sorts.
This one never really manages to be terrible enough to be worth a drunk-watch, which is a pity as that would at least give people a reason to watch this thing. It’s never good enough – not even close, really – either. Hence, it’s stuck in that hell with other movies that really don’t give people any reason to pay any heed to them.
Oh, and this movie is also called Selfie Man. Don’t be fooled – the two films are one and the same; not something you should slide up or swipe right to under any circumstances.
