Chain Letter

source: Chain Letter

Weak acting and the most uninspired plot line I've ever seen since SAW series. Watching this movie is like wasting, in the most useless way, 96 minutes of your life. The plot is a mess, and the characters have no contour of their personalities, plus, even though the killer can be categorized as being a maniac, this is just not enough, because all you see is a big guy that shows his victims how strong and merciless he is. Watching this movie gives you the sensation that it was filmed and distributes in a big rush. The scene where Jessy gets killed is deprived of its meaning, because from the first second you can anticipate the end of the movie.

After searching for another thriller and gruesome movie, i finally find one, "chain letter". The story, everyone know this is another teen movie (although i am an adult) but i still enjoy this a lot. It is about a chain letter and as you know the story goes one. The plot is mainly focusing at technology and not with the title itself. What i can say is that it is better to categorize this into "horror" instead of other genre. I remember some countries in the world are quite fantasized with the so called chain letter. I received it myself ten to fifteen years ago but with different purpose. It goes like this, "if you sent it to 10 people you will get lucky and to 20 or more you will get luckier. It was in the 80's so "this" chain letter movie is simply outdated and no research has been made before from the director (sorry but no offend).

Another day, another horror movie where teenagers are killed off, in no particular inventive way whatsoever. Firstly, this film is exactly what it says. The tag line of "If you don't send it on, you die", should give you enough of a clue as to how bad this film is. And that is probably one of the wittier lines 'Chain Letter' has produced. Everything about this film was bad. The concept, that not sending on a chain letter will have some manic, chain/axe wielding nutter chasing after you, tracking your movements through GPS and hacking into your computer to watch you through your own web cam (despite the fact that the chain letter in that particular case was received on a phone and at no point on the computer in question), was pushing it, to say the least, but if it had been well plotted, written and acted it could just have made it. Unfortunately, it was none of these. The writing was terrible and whenever there was a 'reveal' (not very often, I might add), the writers dumbed down this film so much that they had to literally spell out every last thing. With the exception of Nikki Reed, who played Jessie, the film featured some pretty poor acting. And the plot holes and ridiculous inconsistencies and errors made this teen-gets-killed worse than many of its counterparts. For example - the first death. A body is that badly mutilated, by a killer we have no trace of, yet it is released to be buried 2 days afterwards? No way would that ever happen. Also, the police would not interrogate people at the actual funeral. I don't know if this film was created specifically for morons, but if not, please credit your audience with a little more intelligence than that. The second death, where the engine falls on Dante - how would the police know that was murder on the same day? The guy said he fixed it onto the ceiling himself, why on earth would the police assume someone murdered him, rather than the more obvious solution of the engine falling because it wasn't affixed properly? The third death, where the killer bursts through a skylight (!) - by this stage 3/4 people have been killed and the police are assuming it's the same killer. His own sister has been killed, in the house. Disregarding the fact that that house would be a crime scene just one day on, where the hell are the kids parents? They've just lost a daughter and yet someone can make all the commotion they like, climbing onto a roof and smashing through a skylight to drag their son through it, and the parents do not hear a single thing. Unbelievable. Plus, why have the storyline building up to something about an anti-technology cult, which would have been quite interesting, and then never explore it in any depth? There are so many more annoying, ridiculous things about this movie but it would take me all night to list them all. Overall, the shock moments were cheap and predictable, and didn't make me jump once. The storyline was full of plot holes big enough to fit on ocean liner through, the kills were uninventive and not even particularly gory, and when there would have been gore, the camera cut away! The writing was stilted, the acting was wooden and the mistakes drove me mad. The single payoff came right at the end, and if I hadn't seen it coming would have been the best bit of the film. Seriously, don't bother. 2/10, because sadly, I have seen (slightly) worse.

Chain Letter is not very good. I can relax my standards for horror movies typically if it has some redeeming qualities. An interesting character or a cool villain or unique plot are all components that can get me through. This movie lacked all of these and really lacked any hope of being a decent movie. The movie seems so similar to any horror movie that it's hard to find anything it does well. If you like gruesome deaths, than it has a couple unique "chain related" moments. Other than that, the movie is shallow story wise, has flat characters provides very little pay off. There isn't much suspense built up either, but certain scenes showed some promise. I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone unless they absolutely love chains.

I like a good horror movie, but this piece of crap is nothing more than a few extremely gruesome kill scenes taped together with a script written by a forth grader. I hate torture *, I hate the proliferation of it, had I known this was going to be that I would not have watched it, in fact I only watched up to the point where the Johnny Jones character is brutally tortured and killed, the scene made me sick so I did a quick eject and threw it back in the mail. The convoluted history of this film should have been a clear warning to me to stay far far away. This was filmed in 2007 and bounced from distributor to distributor until the most desperate distributor finally decided to release this turkey on a innocent public. Do not waste your time on this straight to video mess, the acting is horrible, no story whatsoever and it is truly disgusting. I hope someone out there with a brain bigger than a chimps will inject the genre with intelligent horror and not ride on sick gore which if the story sucks is not worth watching anyway, two thumbs down

This is completely pointless movie, one of those where you watch it to see what happens and then it just ends suddenly and you think WTF? Normally in slasher movies like this you'd think the weakest points are the plot and the acting. Surprisingly, there was nothing wrong with the acting. The main cast did what they were meant to but the ultra poor script didn't have any proper development for each character so there was nothing much to feel for any of them. Even the premise of the story didn't make sense. A huge guy with a bandaged face sends out chain letter e-mails to people with the threat of death of they don't play the game. What the game is...no one knows because all the letter says is that if you don't play you die. There's no mention if you delete the e-mail you die or if you don't forward the message you die. This movie is that lame that a few simple rules aren't even scripted in. Some of the deaths are truly gory, even by Saw standards. But in the grand scheme of things they are entirely pointless. Even the Saw scenes had some intelligence to the deaths- you're a bad person but you get a chance at redemption but not until you go through a trial by fire and lots of pain. The deaths in Chain Letter are just gore and pain. This makes watching any Paris Hilton movie fun and educational. Deon Taylor should be made to undergo one of the death scenes in his movie- either that or threaten him with a scene if he doesn't stop writing and directing such rubbish. Recommendation: only if you like to pull out your fingernails with a tweezer dipped in acid.

A well intentioned movie. One that never really feels like it starts until your at the end. Or should I say, "the end?". I feel like this is a director to look out for. The deaths were great and the overall look and feel was really good and fresh. Dialogue and acting could really could have used more help in general. I would say that i would recommend it, but only for the deaths. In all it would have been a great movie had there been a completely different editor and a more cognitive storyline. A lot of buzz words and frantic talking do not a plot make. Oh well. Do yourself a favor and go check out the remake of "I Spit On Your Grave"

This movie was not at all what I had expected it to be. Was it better? No, quite the opposite actually. This movie was really boring and was suffering from a rather silly storyline. The concept of this movie was about some chain letter that was sent out to a group of people, and those who deleted the message ended up dead in gruesome ways. Nothing much interesting happened throughout the movie, aside from the odd brutal killing here and there. But the characters in the movie were fairly one-dimensional and you never really cared for any of them or formed any kind of bond with them, so you ended up just shrugging most of the time and looking forward to the way that the next in line was killed. If you enjoy brutal horror movies with inventive killings, then you might find some enjoyment in "Chain Letter", but if you enjoy horror movies that are driven by a deep, captivating and interesting story, then this movie is a poor choice to put your money on. Personally, I was drifting off a couple of times throughout the movie, and my focus started to shift elsewhere. This movie didn't make any lasting impression, and it will never make it to a second time around in the DVD player. It simply just wasn't worth it.

After receiving an e-mail chain letter a group of friends start to realize this one is no joke. After receiving an e-mail saying send this to 5 people or you will die Jesse Campbell (Reed) sends it from her brothers computer. Like most of us, her friends delete it, but soon find out that was a mistake. There is a scene in the first few minutes that talks about everyone being on the internet and having a cell phone, (everyone can get in contact with everyone at anytime), this leads to the chain letter being sent, because no one can avoid it. I liked the idea of the movie, but it could have been so much better. I would compare this to a "Final Destination" movie. A group of kids start getting killed off one by one in various ways after one event affects them all. "Final Destination" did pull off the idea way better. Not a bad movie but don't expect "Saw" gore. I give it a C+. Would I watch again? - Nope