Hooked Up

Another European horror film, very low budget. This is one of those "found-footage" movies that, unfortunately, have been used a lot by amateur directors, with little money for great productions and good cameras. The result is another suffering film, with a deeply mediocre cinematography. Is it necessary to shake so much? Okay, the movie is "found-footage", but we still have to be able to figure out something about what's being "filmed" (I put quotation marks because we cannot really call it filming), did you know that? The plot is basic: two idiot Americans (always the Americans) are vacationing in Barcelona, in search of the normal things that American teens want to find in Europe: a lot of cheap fun, girls willing to get laid easily, loud music and other amusements for Americans with an IQ below 40. But what looked like a lucky night with two naughty girls will end badly, when a bloodthirsty ghost appears to shred the whole world.

The movie takes a while to get where the action really starts and this is annoying, but then we end up missing that, because the rest of the film is a succession of racing, falling, bleeding... all mixed with the usual sound attempts to scare the audience and a lot of fake blood splashing around. Unfortunately, when the film begins with these things, we're already so bored and so tired of these two idiots that we just want them to die quickly for the movie to end.

A found footage filmed on an iPhone but it still looked like shaky hand cam too me. This one has two friends going to Barcelona with a sole purpose to get laid. They meet a woman who takes them back to her place only to be trapped and hunted by the woman who turns demonic.

This is one of those annoying found footages that makes you angry with everybody freaking out and the camera never staying still. A girl gets her foot stuck in a bear trap so the one friend is trying to open it but struggles so instead of the other friend dropping the camera to help he just keeps filming.

It seemed like a Hostel meets Night Of The Demons but not of that calibre. You might want to skip this one.

Yeah, that's going to be a big pass from here.

I stumbled upon the 2013 horror movie "Hooked Up" here in 2021. I had never heard about it, nor seen it. And with my interest in the horror genre, of course I opted to sit down to watch "Hooked Up" from writers Pablo Larcuen and Eduard Sola.

The movie's cover really oversold the movie by a hundred miles. I mean, the movie's cover looked very interesting and had that mid- to late-1980s feel to it. And I have to say that the cover really caught my attention and made me pick up this 2013 movie.

Well, had I known aforehand that this sort of was a 'found footage' movie, I wouldn't have given it the time of day. I can't simply comprehend the weird fascination with this ridiculous type of subgenre. If I watch a movie, I want to watch something with production quality and something that feels like a studio made movie, not something that my 11 year old son could have helped me film with the family digital video camera and a $5 video editing program.

Sure, the storyline in "Hooked Up" started out okay enough, if you can get past the shoddy camera that is all over the place, more often than not filming at angles that are just painful to watch, as it doesn't show what you want to see. But the storyline quickly falls to pieces once the two Americans reach the house of a local girl's grandfather. Not going to delve further into detail, you just have to watch the movie and suffer like the rest of us, if you want to know more.

The acting in the movie was actually fair enough, taking into consideration that director Pablo Larcuen was left with virtually nothing useful or worthwhile from the inferior script and storyline.

But it was the dubious camera work and the laughable feel of it being a 'found rubbish' movie that just killed it off entirely for me. I loathe this genre of movie.

Now, I can't and won't recommend anyone taking time out of their lives to sit down and watch "Hooked Up". Some of us suffered through this horrible ordeal so you don't have to. Trust me.

My rating of "Hooked Up" lands on a more than generous two out of ten stars.

HOOKED UP is a found footage horror movie which tells the story of two young American men who travel to Barcelona, mainly to help one of them overcome a painful breakup. There, they meet a couple girls with whom they hook up, and then trouble begins for them that is way beyond what they could have imagined.

This movie is bound to turn off a lot of people right from the start. It opens with a scene featuring a character who vomits into a toilet that looks like the actor really is vomiting. One main character is annoyingly obnoxious, the other annoyingly whiny. There is quite a bit of locker room-like talk about the purpose of the trip, and so on. In short, there is a lot of crudeness in this movie.

If, by the time the characters have hooked up, you are not sufficiently offended to stop watching, then you will be treated to an extended fast-paced and high-energy cat-and-mouse game inside an old barricaded building for the remainder of the running time.

I believe the secret to enjoying something like this is to regard it not as a movie experience, but as a thrill ride. The first-person perspective makes it easy to do so; just sit back, forget about character development (though there are character arcs, in fact they go in opposite directions for the two protagonists), plot (though there is at least the outline of a plot which connects present events to the past) or other formalities and take it all in as if you were right there.

Not everyone can do this, but if you can, you will likely find the movie to be a lot of fun.

I love fast-paced found footage horror movies, so this was right up my alley. A few of the scenes reminded me of REC (2007) which, incidentally, is also set in Barcelona. However that work has a much higher caliber than this, in fact I consider it to be possibly the best found footage horror movie ever made.

A thematically similar film is HOSTEL (2005), but the basic plot outline reminds me of DASHCAM (2021) which also involves a fast-paced bonkers cat and mouse game involving at least one exceedingly obnoxious character for the majority of its short duration.

Given the movie's crudeness and lack of ambition to be much more than a thrill ride, it is not surprising that it got heavily panned.

One issue I'd like to address is the quality of the production design/cinematography. It seems to me that those who have criticized it for being amateurish have not seen very many found footage films. Having seen over 150 of these, I can confidently say that the movie is well above average for this genre in respect to both.

So, if you can get past the crudeness and turn your brain off while watching, you might find this quite enjoyable.

Trying to get past a breakup, a pair of friends head to Barcelona to find women, and when they take a pair back to their house they end realizing that they've become involved with a dangerous demonic force intent on killing them forcing the pair to try to get out of the house alive.

This was a decidedly decent if wholly underwhelming found-footage effort. One of the more enjoyable elements here is the great work it does at presenting a rather intriguing and potentially suspenseful situation. The idea of taking the rather familiar route of the girl being some kind of demonic spirit creature at the end of the night means that the clichéd set-up means that there's plenty of fun to come from the creature going out to kill them as that kind of action is what sells this. There's plenty of brutal, gory bloodletting that emerges from this kind of action as all kinds of encounters and confrontations with the demon spirit makes for an enjoyable time. Along with the great amount of fun that comes from how it works out the final twist at the end, which comes off with a slight bit of originality and does end this on a somewhat enjoyable note. While these here make this one watchable enough, there's a lot of problems with this one. The biggest problem here is the fact that there's just not a whole lot of interest in the first half here as we're continually around this annoying and really irritating group of friends who are really not worth spending time with. The fact that they continually rag on each, push each other into situations they don't want to be involved in and are just basically not that interesting with all the dude-bro comments doesn't make for an endearing or enjoyable start to this one. Not only that, the film's entry into the particular found-footage genre means that very little of the film makes any sense at all, from how the film's battery life is able to stay lit the entire seventy some-odd minute running time while having the bright flashlight feature enabled the entire time to why the pair are continually wanting to record the matters of what might be their last moments alive instead of trying to save themselves or wondering why the film is able to be recorded in the first place with the indestructible nature of the camera being able to stay on whenever it crashes to the ground or gets thrown into the wall with the videographer. None of these efforts are all that intriguing and really just make this one part of the genre which fall into all the usual problems here and that doesn't make for a fun time here. Likewise, the other big problem here is the fact that there are so many moments of questionable decision-making that continually puts them in danger rather than being realistically played out to try to get them out of the house, and for the most part it's what really holds this one back.

Rated R: Graphic Language, Graphic Violence, Nudity and excessive drinking.