Jamie
A group of teenage girls watch a video describing how to summon the Slender Man and (surprise surprise) accidentally summon Slender Man. Soon one of them is missing, another insane, and the remaining two are trying their damndest to stop the madness. Will they be able to stop the Slender Man before it’s too late? Find out in… Slender Man.
How?! A group of teenage girls stumble upon an online video claiming to summon a demon called Slender Man. Why do they click it? Because some guys they know claimed they were also summoning this Slender Fellow. Cool. They click the video and more or less watch The Ring starring Naomi Watts. Super spooked they decide not to talk about it ever again… that is until one of the girls goes missing, another goes insane, and the other two start to see Slender Chap lurking around every corner. They get in contact with someone online in order to try to make this weird Slender Dude go away (and bring back the other girl I guess), but it kinda gets them in even deeper and roping in one of the girl’s little sister. Eventually they realize that Slender Bloke is more of an idea than a real thing (you know?) and that they really can’t defeat him… so the whole movie is kinda useless other than to serve as a parable of sorts for the dangers of the internet. You wouldn’t get it cause you’re not young and hip like us. It’s an allegory and a metaphor, you know? Anyway, the one girl decides to sacrifice herself to Slender Man to save her sister and she gets absorbed into a tree. For real. THE END.
Why?! Wow… I’m rarely stumped by one of these questions. Ok, so… Slender Man is a demon so he’s just doing it because he’s evil. Easy enough. The girls summon Slender Man because… they hear that some other people are summoning Slender Man. Then they want to stop him so they don’t die. My God. The motivations in this film are tragic.
What?! I assume that they use certain phones and computers for all Slender Man activities but it’s hard to note those kinds of things in the theater. It wasn’t hard to remember the scene where Slender Man began to reach for one of the characters but then it turned out that he was just reaching for a nice refreshing Coca-Cola. That certainly was jarring, but not unexpected. Pepsi’s gross. Slender Man don’t play that.
Who?! I fully expected half the actresses in this film to be aspiring pop stars, but I was incorrect. Instead the most interesting thing about the film is the writing credit given to Victor Surge, the username of the guy who first submitted the Slender Man art to the website SomethingAwful back in the day. By all account this guy has no interest in engaging with his creation and more or less says that he doesn’t even really use the internet much… and yet there have been no less than four feature films made about Slender Man (this one obviously being the biggest) and a full season of a television show. He keeps getting credits. Weird and wild stuff.
Where?! Patrick pointed out to me that all the where and when details are actually shown in the trailer, which is pretty amazing. This film takes place in the small town of Winsford which is apparently in MA. We get some Revolutionary War talk in the middle of the film and also a 978 area code for a character’s phone number. Other than that nothing solid. My guess is that some license plates could be seen, just not easily in the theater where I can’t analyze each frame like it’s the Zapruder film. C+.
When?! Also in the trailer is a MISSING sign for one of the girls which clearly states that she went missing on May 30th, 2018. Makes sense as it’s near the end of the school year. This is a fabulous A-. I certainly wish they mentioned how much fun they had at their Memorial Day slumber party considering that is likely the weekend on which they first watched the video. But alas, guess they didn’t want an A.
This movie is straight terrible… I’m not sure I even need to say more. It feels like an unfinished film. Something that was recut or refilmed after bad previews or to get a PG-13 rating with little regard to the fact that the plot is straight garbage and bereft of any or all motivation or development for the characters. Not to mention that you have a movie monster with no interesting characteristics, no hope of being defeated, and no connection to the physical world… so why would I care about this Slender Guy? I want Bye Bye Man weird dog and coin shit. I want to have them find out that he’s the spirit of a guy who lost his daughter in a tragic boat accident and they have to go out on the misty lake to pull up her bones from the wreckage for a final burial (only to find that she was the demon all along!). I want a real horror film antagonist. Not this half-ass demon bullshit. Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! This week we watched a modern day urban legend … what’s that? No, we didn’t watch Urban Legend. Naw, this is a horror film for the technological age … what’s that? No, we’ve already seen FeardotCom. No, you know, the one with the updated boogeyman character … what’s that? Goddamnit, no, we watched The Bye Bye Man last year! Whatever, we watched Slender Man, I was talking about Slender Man. Let’s go!
The Good – Oooooof. There are some shots which are well done. You can kind of see that the director is the most competent part of this film. It manages to keep the tension cranked up to about 8/10 for the whole movie, which is far more than The Bye Bye Man could say. If it could have managed a few more scares people would have probably given it a break at least.
P’s View on the Preview – Obviously the main thing here was the comparisons to The Bye Bye Man. Back to back years you have very not-scary thin men haunting people in rural America? I mean … yes please. The only thing we were hoping for was for the Slender Man to be hilarious. Because The Bye Bye Man looked goofy. Yo looked goofy!
The Bad – He did not look sufficiently goofy. The acting throughout was terrible. No moment in the entire film was scary, not even the jump scares. This film is entirely derivative of other horror films, it is effectively The Ring Ring Man, because it is just the plot of The Ring applied using the bad guy from The Bye Bye Man. The Bye Bye Man was hilarious while this is simply a tragedy, a not-scary nothing movie. Boo! I say boo!
Get Yo Rant On – So yo, first The Bye Bye Man, and now this? Why all the hate on libraries all of a sudden. Naturally when you summon a demon you need to go to the local library to see what you can find. Under “The Bye Bye Man” there should be plenty about the weird albino drifter killing people with his dog. In Slender Man they naturally need to find a book on … demons or something, so they head to the local library. Natch. What’s this, The Super Thin Get-outta Here Man is here?! Who could have guessed it. But seriously … local libraries are struggling enough without today’s youth being afraid of accidentally seeing The Ring Me Once Man or whatever making it all spooky and stuff. Leave the local library alone horror films. End rant.
The BMT – Nope. Merely a not-Bye-Bye-Man which hurts my heart. Get out of here Slender Man you piece of not-scary garbage. Come back when you look goofy. That would have been your saving grace … like if you had a top hat and a slender dog and some like … weird rusty bike sounds plays when you were near. Now we’re cooking with fire!
Welcome to Earf – I needed a little help on this. Joey King was in Slender Man, but I didn’t remember that she was in Independence Day: Resurgence, which also stars Jeff Goldblum who was in Mortdecai with Johnny Depp, who was in Transcendence with Morgan Freeman who was the narrator of Conan the Barbarian (2011), which also starred Ron Perlman who was in In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale with Leelee Sobieski who was in Here on Earth. Welcome to Earf!
Theater reView – There isn’t much Street Cred yet so I’ll let that be for now, but I do think this will be the worst horror film of the year by leagues. As for my theatrical experience … uh, remind me never to go to a Cineworld again. Now, I thought that the one in Chelsea was just an anomaly. Overly expensive and dirty. Nope, that apparently is the norm. Vue is one million times better. First, Vue usually has sweet six pound viewings all of the time. It is clean, and nice, and their kiosks work. Cineworld is garbage. The audience was appropriately muted, and the theater was fine though, nice and packed for a Tuesday night showing of Slender Man.
And that is that. We did all our homework last year by watching The Bye Bye Man, so …
Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 