Unboxed

I watched thirty minutes of this drivel before I could not take any more. I thought that this was supposed to be a horror picture, but the first two deaths were completely boring. The first girl is poisoned with jelly beans and the next one was poisoned by a vape pen.

I knew I wasn't going to like this from the beginning, though. It starts with some "influencer" making a video for her followers and.. yeah, she's as fake as you would expect.

Then we sit through a meeting of what look like professionals who are actually just more millennials planning on how to make other "influencers" "stars."

The main girl (I assume) is talking to her boyfriend and he offers to walk her home and they head off together. Next thing we see, she's walking u her street by herself with no boyfriend to be seen. Excellent continuity editing, right there... /s

She is another so-called "influencer" and we see her getting set up for her next live stream. As time passes, we are shown place cards announcing the upcoming stream in fluttering, cutesy text. The point at which I said enough is enough, though was when the girl started arranging the "gifts" from her sponsors on the table. This was literally a five minute scene of just her moving the same boxes around over and over, all set to a hypnotic, monotonous beat.

The acting is abysmal. The dialog is forced and unnatural. The characters are annoying. The only positive thing I can say about this is that, unlike the rest of what comes out today, this was actually well lit. It's sad when THAT is the highlight of a movie!

If you have no use for anti-social media or the kind of people who do, do yourself a favor and stay far away from this waste of digital film.

The film is around an hour and 12 minutes, and it was mildly entertaining. It had a reasonable pace, with a suitable crescendo in plot but lacked acting skills and creativity. It was a bit silly at times, and also laughable, but not the worst thing I've seen. It is centred around a young woman who is trying to make it big in the social media world. With her manager putting pressure on her to land this big sponsor contract, Laura films a live show on Halloween, opening boxed gifts sent to her by her fans and sponsors. However, as the night draws on, and the boxes are being opened one by one, live on camera in front of thousands of viewers, things take a low budget, poorly acted turn...

I feel like it's fine to make a movie that has been done to death but if you do decide to do that you should make sure to do it well. Unboxing is a movie that feels like it's a student project made on a weekend with about $100 to spend and does nothing well.

The acting is pretty terrible across the board, some of it you might expect to see better in middle school theater. Laura, the main character, probably does the best but even she is not good at all. She kiiiind of starts selling it at the end of the movie, but the rest of the time she's just kind of...not there. Just vapid streamer. Special shoutout to the other end of the acting spectrum, Eddie del Carmen for possibly some of the worst acting I've ever seen in a movie. I guess that might be ok to be that bad of an actor if he were a better writer/director, but, well...

Of course it's hard to blame these actors when the roles you're playing don't actually have any character. It's a stretch to even call some of the main characters cliches. Laura has the most depth of any of the characters and it her entire character goes only as deep as "girl who is an influencer." The rest are typical stoner boyfriend, shy nerdy kid who wants the girl, and finally "friend". Oh yeah, and influencer agent who wants her high school client to dress sexier.

Aside from the characters and acting, the camera work is bad. The editing is bad. The music is bad. The dialogue is bad. The story is bad. Just bad all around.

So what is this movie?

This movie centers around Laura, a high school girl who is some sort of professional mak-eup streamer/influencer. She actually has an agent and everything, an agent so devoted to her that she sits in her office during Halloween to watch her client. So Laura gets all sorts of influencer gifts and giveaways, a completely professional setup, has thousands of viewers and has even hit more than 1,000,000 views but she is just a terrible streamer. Zero personality, zero interesting to say. Maybe that's what people look for in a streamer? I don't know.

Anyways, it's Halloween night and instead of going to the final part of the year (yes, her friends make sure to tell her it's the final party of the year even though it's only Halloween) she's doing the worlds worst live stream. She soon starts getting blackmailed into doing increasingly worse things on stream for the enjoyment of some random person. They never really bother explaining why this person does what they do...they just kind of do it? Motives are for losers.

Where was I? Oh right, bad movie. Laura does the things, killer starts upping the ante. You've seen this movie 100 times probably and you've definitely seen it done better. I'd like to at least give the people in this movie credit for trying hard but I don't think they even did that. The best thing I can say about the movie is it's only 73 minutes. Skip this movie.

The first few mins got me - and influencer gives a shallow, very fake thanks to her subscribers (it seems legit then she spits the stuff out off camera) for the gifts she receives from them, and then dies because she eats poison gummy bears someone sends her while she's live streaming. Or does she die? I dunno, they mention she just 'disappeared' even though she was foaming at the mouth like she had rabies.

Her acting was fine, but it just went downhill from here....

The acting of all the other cast members was SO BAD. It was like they were reading their lines directly off the screen. The sound was also all over the place. Someone would speak and it would be turned up so loud, and the others were normal volume standing right next to the loud one. Like their mics didn't work.

Do not recommend, I think I lasted maybe 10 mins tops.