Friend Request (2016) 1h 32m

Okay, based on the name of this movie and the tag line on that poster I bet you're expecting me to just up and talk mad shit on this film.  The moment the I saw the title of this film I let out an audible groan of displeasure (and that poster really didn't help) but not all things are as they seem and sometimes you need to peel back the skin to get to the sweet sweet fruit inside.

Friend Request opens with a professor telling his class that a fellow student (Marina) had killed herself.  After some blasé reactions from most of the class, one of them asks if it was true that a video of the suicide was posted on the school website.  Flashback now to when our main girl, Laura, ends up meeting and befriending Marina.  Laura becomes Marina's Fakebook friend but after Marina feels her friendship was betrayed by Laura she practically attacks her before running off and her eventual suicide.  The suicide though is a ritual in which Marina becomes a ghost in the machine.  Through controlling Laura's Fakebook, Marina begins to turn people against Laura all while using the modern black mirrors of laptop and smartphone screens to kill her closest friends so that Laura knows what it really feels like to be "alone."

My overall opinion of this film is indifferent, but I think that's because I watch most of these horror movies by myself.  Once my viewing was complete I had the feeling that this would work much better as a Friday night with friends type of film.  It's made for a crowd to react to it and each other as opposed to one dude sitting on his couch, but I can recognize that and give it credit where it's due.

The concept feels a little bit immature to me, but I'm also long past being a college student, and even when I was, I wasn't a social butterfly so I don't have a frame of reference for this.  Friend Request did have one moment that I popped for and that was that early on we're told Marina has Trichotillomania (a hair pulling disorder).  Later in the film we are shown her bald spot it has become this creepy wasp nest and there was a flash of "Oh shit! someone took some time to think of that and it really pays off!"  There's also the black mirrors existing in technology as one of those techno-pagan things I never thought of but its inclusion only helped this film.

So overall, watch this with friends.  Order pizza, have some snacks, get caffeinated or inebriated, and have a good time.

I give Friend Request 2.5 Japanese Giant Hornets out of 5:

Stung (2015) 1h 27m

In nature, there are two kinds of assholes: Canadian geese, and wasps.  Everything else is super cool and safe and not a dick to you.  I didn't go to school for any kind of zoology or animal studies, so I'm absolutely the best authority on this kind of info.  Consummate pro-fucking-fessional here.

Stung has the most simple plot.  Wasps fucking hate WASPS... but not the band W.A.S.P. because they have some good songs.  Our setting is a mansion in the middle of wherever that is having a rich white person party to honor someone's father/husband.  On the property are some odd sized and brutal looking wasps that are the size of your hand.  They replicate by stinging something the shortly after that a new one explodes out of the host and is the same size as whatever body they were growing in.  So once people start getting stung then we get human sized wasp things.  They kind of look like Jeff Goldblum as the Fly, but in asshole form.

This movie actually tries and that's what hurts the most here.  Most of the acting is done well.  The giant wasps are good mix of puppets and CGI.  The directing is decent.  However, you're stuck watching a film about mutant wasps.  It's not even B-grade material anymore because these ideas were B-films back in the 50's as the drive-in double creature features.  Them, Attack of the Giant Gila Monster, Tarantula... it was done to death decades ago.

I give Stung 1 wolf pack era Sting out of 5 for trying:

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