Review by Annie Riordan
There wasn’t no innernet way back when I was a stupid teenage girl in the long ago 1980s. Back then, if you wanted to meet one o’ them seckshul predators, you had to get on a bus and go all the way to the mall! Why I can’t even tell you how many times I went out walking with my friends – uphill, both ways, barefoot, in ten feet of snow – and not one single serial killer tried to lure us into his windowless van with the offer of illicit candy. Goddamned kids have it so easy nowadays with their chat rooms and their Wifi’s and their 4chans and stuff.
For the first hour of its runtime, “Megan Is Missing” is a spectacularly stupid chronicle of the lives of two Hollywood teenagers. Megan – she of the ominous title – is the popular slut whose mother hates her and whose dark past of molestations committed by stepfathers and camp counselors alike drives her to be ever more promiscuous, attending parties where she drinks too much, smokes too much (without actually inhaling) and blows any popped-collared douchecanoe who snaps his fingers. Her best friend Amy is her utter antithesis; sweet, virginal, plain, unpopular, still called “Princess” by her doting daddy. The inexplicable bond between these two seems to stem from their bottomless low self esteems, a thick glue of worthlessness that holds them together more powerfully than 3M Scotch Weld.
Megan’s life is at an all-time low when, lo and behold, a new guy pops up just in time to make her feel pretty and special. His name is Josh. He hangs out online a lot but, goshdarnit, his webcam is conveniently broken so Megan can’t see what he looks like. He sounds super cool though and he’s really nice, so Megan agrees to meet him behind a slummy diner in about 20 minutes. Sounds totally legit, right? When Megan fails to show up for school the next day, Amy knows that something is terribly wrong. No one else seems too concerned, until the one day turns into several, and then the days turn into weeks. The MISSING fliers go up. The local news is all over the story like flies on shit. Security cam footage turns up, showing Megan being led away from the diner by a strange man. But Megan herself has disappeared without a trace.
Amy has an idea about what may have happened and stupidly logs online looking for Josh, and finds him…or has he found her? The cool, sweet veneer is gone: Josh is a sick fuck, and while he doesn’t admit to having taken Megan, he assures Amy that the same thing – or worse – can happen to her if she doesn’t keep her big fucking mouth shut. Wisely, Amy reports this to the police. Not so wisely, she wanders around the lonely hills and wooded areas of LA by herself. Apparently, the scene in which Amy’s short term memory is surgically removed from her brain was cut from the film’s final reels. It’s the only thing I can think of that would explain Amy’s fucking idiocy in wandering off alone after having been told by a faceless psychopath that he is constantly watching her.
Amy disappears, but unlike Megan, we know who has her and exactly what’s happening to her, because the final 20+ minutes of film is an excruciating video diary which reveals – in sickening detail – Amy’s harrowing ordeal. What started out as a slightly racy (and, quite often, badly acted) After School Special about the tragic results of Stranger Danger, veers right the fuck off the road and slams headfirst into torture porn land. If Audition and Hostel had a baby, and aborted it, and then sewed its corpse onto the ass end of an episode of 90210, it might look a lot like this movie. It’s a filthy, grimy, ugly surprise at the bottom of a moldy box of cereal. I’ve seen worse – Jin Won Kim’s “The Butcher” and “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” come to mind – but this is pretty fucking unpleasant. Rolled in sugar and spice, then deep fried in diarrhea. Okay, I think I’ve exhausted the gross metaphors for now – you get the idea.
This film claims to be based on a true story, although I have yet to learn what that true story is. Sadly, there’s too many true stories to which this movie can be compared: Polly Klaas, Amber Hagerman, Adam Walsh, etc. Maybe I’m better off not knowing. As a cautionary tale, “Megan Is Missing” is both stereotypically shallow and graphically extreme, giving us the Grimm Fairy Tale version of online predator danger: completely devoid of common logic and parental supervision, then wallowing in the unsanitized, unDisneyfied world of the real Grimm’s tales, where nothing ends happily and no one – no matter their intentions – escapes the monster.
Bleak and depressing. Let your teenage daughter watch it at her next slumber party if you can’t be bothered to supervise her online habits. The bills for her psychotherapy will be astronomical, but I can guarantee you: she will never leave the house again.
Megan is Missing is available now on Region 1 DVD and VOD from Anchor Bay.