Review by Ben Bussey
Let’s hear it for metaphor, fuelling the fires of the horror genre for time immemorial. Nothing validates a tawdry spectacle of murder and monstrosity better than some nice hints of symbolism; the sense that this gruesome slice of cheap thrills has an underlying social message, relevant to the contemporary audience… and if it can relate to zombies, then even better. Consumerism makes us mindless zombies; technology makes us mindless zombies; believing the lies of our governments makes us mindless zombies; and so on and so forth. Of course, you only need watch Dawn of the Dead back to back with Diary of the Dead (not that I am suggesting anyone put themselves through that ordeal) to realise there’s a difference between filmmakers utilising allegory because they really have something to say, and simply doing it out of a desperate wish to capture the zeitgeist.
Take a wild guess where Antisocial fits into this equation.
A zombie movie about social networking was inevitable, I suppose. The odd thing about Antisocial is how close it plays this theme to its chest for the most part. I mean, it’s right there in the title. The opening scenes show a couple of high school girls doing an innocuous vlog which gradually, mysteriously turns into a bloodbath. Not long thereafter we meet our heroine Sam (Michelle Mylett) whose boyfriend unceremoniously dumps by her via videochat, seconds later updating his relationship status to single on ‘The Social Redroom’ – no prizes for guessing what site that’s meant to represent. That’s pretty much all we get for the first twenty five minutes or so: online communication BAD, actual human contact GOOD.
But then, once Sam piles into her platonic-but-obviously-not-really male friend’s house with his college buddies for a planned epic New Year’s Eve bash, the shit hits the fan, and the world outside descends into chaos as a global pandemic hits, turning millions into eightball-eyed homicidal maniacs in mere hours. (Or so we’re told, anyway; the budget clearly wasn’t there to show any of this.) Obviously this Social Redroom site has something to do with it, and I don’t consider it a spoiler to say so – yet the movie is so coy about this, acting like it’s going to come as some great shock when it’s revealed in the final act. Alas, by sidestepping its one relatively unique feature for the bulk of its running time, Antisocial simply winds up drawing attention to what a painfully generic low-budget horror movie it really is.
Making his feature directorial debut, Cody Calahan doesn’t do much to make himself stand apart here. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with the overall look and feel of the film, there’s nothing particularly eye-catching about it either. Likewise the script, from Calahan and Chad Archibald; the small ensemble which gradually turns in on itself isn’t the worst of its kind we’ve ever seen, but there’s absolutely nothing special about it either. With the material they’re given, I don’t think the cast ever had a chance to give anything but mundane performances. The worst part of all is how utterly humourless an enterprise Antisocial is; it takes itself way too seriously from the word go, and winds up utterly joyless because of it.
Now, in all fairness, things do go uphill ever so slightly in the final scenes, once inevitably the outside world finds its way in, and the survivors decide on a perhaps unforeseen response… but as much as this more OTT finale should up the shits and giggles factor, it’s hard to care when everything up to that point has been dull as dishwater. Oh, and as for any deep, heartfelt social commentary on the broader ramifications of social networking…? Forget about it. It’s an angle, nothing more, and so far as I can tell the film has absolutely nothing to say on the subject that we haven’t heard umpteen times already.
I guess Antisocial could have been worse – they could have called it Status Update of the Dead, for one thing. Then again, given the rage virus angle, perhaps 28 Updates Later would have been more appropriate. Either way, I’m certainly not about to click the like button on this one.
Antisocial is out on Region 2 DVD and Blu-ray on 14th April 2014, from Monster Pictures.