Clickbait: Unfollowed

Called out to a remote mansion, a pair of influencers arrive to find other influencers at the house on the same mission where they find themselves competing against each other in a series of dangerous games for their hosts where the losers are killed off, forcing them to get away alive.

This was a much better feature than expected. One of the finer points of this one is the fun way this goes about subverting the expectations of everyone during the game. The fact that everyone tends to play by rather obvious influencer personalities and tropes with the self-help guru, fitness freak, make-up guide, positivity promoter, money maker, and the kid with a stage mom all come together with it seemingly being obvious who they're going to be and what type of personalities they all have. Instead of going with the obvious, there's some fun to be had with the different ways the group shows off how different they really are with the way they go about changing up the formula involving the group coming together to help each other in between the games and making sure they stay involved in the process, coming together as the rounds get tougher and more vicious. That gives the games they play throughout here a lot of fun integrating games with deadly consequences. Operating on the idea that they have to lay bare their soul even if it doesn't equate to their cultivated image beforehand makes this one feature some ingenious challenges including filming videos about their true self or trying to create a viral sales pitch under the guidelines imposed upon them at the last minute with gruesome implications for failure, it makes for a fun touch here to see how this plays out here. As the games continue and the idea of fighting back starts to impact how it's played, this one gets some intriguing twists and revelations out to help make the games even more impactful as the manipulation to figure out what's going on at the house. With some decent enough gore in the games, these are enough to give this one some positive points although there are a few issues with this one that hold it down. Among its biggest drawbacks is the weird decision to unveil the mastermind and the plot behind everything at the mid-way point in the film, only to continue the games anyway. There's little reason why this one would go about introducing a storyline where they figure out the secret villains in such a manner as they do where it comes together logically yet still seemingly accidentally blurting out everything yet then putting the pieces together later on while then going on with the games anyway. Hence, this feels like a highly contrived setup. The other issue here is an equal amount of flimsy knowledge about who these people are, using just these bare outlines of plot points and character development about the world they're involved in which makes for a lot of guesswork to help figure things out. These all bring this one down overall.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, a sex scene, and children-in-jeopardy.

Stumbling into this film, I knew very little about it. Being into the horror gameshow plots such as "Escape Room" and "Cube", I decided to give it a watch.

The film moreso reminded me of "Influencer", another film in the horror/dark comedy genre. This film tilts more towards goofy comedy and mediocre script and acting, as any classic horror movie.

It keeps you entertained and laughing at times, not necessarily because it's the best horror comedy you've ever watched, but because there's an element of fairness, integrity, values and influencer dynamics.

One will discover that it's not just everyday people who'll get on each others nerves...

Bonus that one can't tell it was all shot in South Africa with mostly south african actors/actresses.

*** PREFACE: I may be the wrong audience to be leaving an opinion here, compared to the other first-time reviewers only gushing over it, but I wanted to touch on some thoughts about the actual story... ***

-- PSYCHOSoShal:

So right off the bat, I'm sorry, but the title is pretty meh. I don't even know how "Clickbait" has anything to do with the movie. You girls already had this perfect word you came up with that easily lent itself to any number of clever play-on-words titles sitting right in front of you with "SoShal". You could have gone with almost anything related to "Social _______" (The SoShal Experiment? SoShal Media Challenge?), the possibilities write themselves.

-- SoShal STANDING:

It was unconventional to say the least. Deftly produced as everything looked and sounded great and professionally put together, the lighting, the shot compositions, they all worked well... The dialogue however got a bit heavy with slogans, quotes, and influencer advice (which may have been apropos) but it all began to sound like fortune cookies to me.

Overall it reminds me of similar movies OCTOGAMES (2022) and FUNHOUSE (2019) which had similar plots, budgets, and a similar presentation of the "contest" with the use of a virtual host. Even the NPC SoShal workers felt indicative of SQUID GAMES, except because they came in different heights and wore their pants up high they reminded of those "Shy Guys" from Super Mario Bros., but with fencer masks.

And speaking of costuming, why did y'all have homegirl dressed up like one of those fortune teller machines (like from the movie BIG) the whole movie?

-- SoShal MEDIA INFLUENCE:

There is a lot about social media influencer culture that I'm just not familiar with, so I think movies like these would really benefit from having a proxy character for the audience to be introduced to things and how things work. A character who is discovering so the audience can discover (as commonly done in fantasy movies, card poker movies, science movies, stock trading movies) our own Neo in the Matrix.

Because as it stands I didn't quite get that these caricatures were indicative of what's popular on Youtube (LookLoop). Or why these characters were who best represented it.

I would've imagined in a story like this (and given what the villains were aiming to accomplish) it would've also included like an InstaModel, a self-important outrage media critic, a watch me eat stuff guy, a sexy try-on haul girl, and a conspiracy theorist as well. A whole gamut of "look at me" personalities.

-- SoShal ISSUES:

1. I didn't get how they all mostly knew of each other if they only had followings of 250K. Coincidence or convenience, but there are YouTubers with millions of followers that I either never heard of, or watch, or discovered years after everyone else did (and I loathe the day I learned what a Pewtipie was) so I can't imagine like Ron Tron, Lele Pons, Legal Eagle, the Corridor Crew, and Ryan George all just happening to be fans of one another (much less with smaller channels at just 250K subs).

2. I also didn't get what made the kid unboxing things channel be so believably popular. He seemed to be so disinterested in being in anything (including the movie itself) and had to have his mom feeding him lines to parrot the entire time like it's all still new to him. How would his fanbase not be put off by her disembodied voice constantly yakking off-camera like he's a ventriloquist dummy? How is that entertainment?

3. Also were all of their fanbases just sitting around online in empty virtual rooms waiting for them to randomly pop in to livestream record their 1-minute hostage videos? And with them filming these things side-by-side within earshot of each other, that is exactly what these videos would look like to any longtime fans of theirs.

4. Where would all of those new followers even come from and so suddenly if their uploads were being posted to each of their own hacked channels for their already existing audience? There was nothing mentioned about drawing in outside interest nor a hashtag from the start to encourage any crossover pollination from amongst each other's followings.

Actually that would've made more sense to have their live feeds simulcast across each others channels thus pooling all 6 of their 250K following into a potential 1.5 million net total.

-- LAST SoShal POINTS:

• WTF was on that eyeball? -
• LOL! The gun poking in/out of the cubby. -
• HUH? What happened to the rest of the Shy Guys? -
• HEY, the poster looks like the Looney Tunes "That's all folks!" background. -
• AND So what if some hacker deletes your faux-youtube account, it's 2024 and these are supposed to be successful influencers, wouldn't they have other social media accounts to fall back on if they had to restart their "YouTube" channel?

Well that's it for my 4 and a half cents and some change.

If you're a fan of Melanie Scrofano and Kat Barrell then you will get it. No one is trying to make a pretentious film or win major awards. It's two friends, or more like twisted sisters, having fun working together to churn out something people will want to watch more than once. We've got Easter eggs, references, and a kid you will actually like with a manamomster from Hell.

One may ask, "What's so clickbait-y about it?" Gotcha! You took a peek and found out. Whether that was intentional or not I will choose to believe it was. If you've ever watched every reality show on Netflix, this is for you.

I give it 2/10 unfollows.

I watched this with friends and we all had a great time. It was funny, witty and absolutely crazy. The horror scenes were gory and we kept thinking how on earth did they come up with such crazy ways for murder. The dialogues are catchy and memorable. The acting was superb with all the actors fitting their roles perfectly. The sattire on todays obsession with social media likes felt quite apt. The relationship between the two sisters was the highlight of the movie for me.

Although this isn't a genre I usually watch, I enjoyed particularly how the movie married horror and comedy perfectly. Really hoping they make a sequel. All round fun and craziness - The writers/directors sure had fun and they transferred that to us, the viewers.

I will be watching it again soon.