The Friendship Game

The real friendship game is asking your friends to watch this and then seeing if they remain friends with you.

This starts off fine, but within 5 minutes it goes downhill into a confusing poorly written and directed mess. It is so difficult to figure out what is going on: Is this real? Is this a flashback? Is this a flashforward? Certain scenes will replay again line for line or scenes will repeat with slight variations. The movie continues on being like this until it reaches its conclusion which ends up being even worse than the rest of the movie. Multiple people were involved in this movie: someone actually wrote this garbage, someone else directed it and along the way no one involved said anything about how bad it was.

Maybe there's an alternate timeline/universe where this is a good movie.

As I stumbled upon this 2022 sci-fi horror movie "The Friendship Game" in 2023, I opted to watch it because it was a horror movie that I hadn't already seen, and also because it had Peyton List on the cast list.

I had not actually heard about this movie prior to watching it, so I didn't know what I was in for. So writer Damien Ober and director Scooter Corkle had every chance to impress and bedazzle me.

And they both failed to do so. Sure, "The Friendship Game" was sort of watchable I suppose, but it wasn't really a movie that appealed much to me. The storyline was just not really all that interesting, and as the narrative proceded at a rather slow and dull pace, it was getting more and more difficult to maintain interest in the storyline.

The acting performances in "The Friendship Game" were fair enough, though I wasn't really impressed with it. And as for Peyton List, well then she was much better in "Cobra Kai" than she was here in "The Friendship Game".

For a horror movie then "The Friendship Game" just didn't cut it for me. Having grown up watching horror movies for about 40 plus some years, then this movie just didn't really had the contents that mattered. I am sure that newcomers to the horror genre might get a kick out of this movie.

My rating of "The Friendship Game" lands on a four out of ten stars.

I couldn't tell if this convoluted attempt to create a film was the fault of of the director or the writer, because the results of both are just so bad. Firstly the story makes no sense. Well it started with an idea, about an object that magically tests friendships, but after that it falls apart. Yes it literally falls apart after the first five minutes of the movie. The story meanders, gets weird and confusing and seems like the writer didn't know how to get the beginning of the story, to the end of the story. All the loose ends, and questions this film leaves are just frustrating, especially the question " How the heck did this film even get made?!!!". It's like someone who starts telling you something interesting and just stops mid-sentence and stares into space. The choices in scenes and how they were put together are dumbfounding and just add to the idea that the writer had no idea where this story was going. Jumping from one idea to another and adding elements that make you wonder what they're really trying to accomplish- which it looks like they don't even know. I couldn't even finish it, it was so bad, but watched it on fast forward to see if there was anything worth continuing, and even that was a waste of time. Don't bother wasting your time, just unwatchable.

Please do yourself the biggest favor and spare yourself the hour and some change of your life that you will never get back watching this mess of a film. Honestly, the characters are vapid, shallow people you never truly care about, the story is a confusing mess, and you never truly get what the hell is happening in any given time, scenes just repeat over and over for no reason as it doesn't add much to anything. It dragged so hard because of it... Get to the point already in which they never did. They tried to make this edgy and cool mix of a sort of Hellraiser, Wish Upon, Ground Hog Day type fiasco and it ended up confusing and plain stupid.

If this is how 2024 is beginning for me choosing this wreck of film to watch, I hope the rest of the year isn't as bad. Geesh.

Having been sorely disappointed by 2022's Hellraiser reboot, I was admittedly drawn in my the contraption shown in the trailer. Eerily reminiscent of the puzzle box seen in the aforementioned film, I decided to give this film a chance where I normally wouldn't have even bothered (horror movies starring teenagers get an automatic, "No, thanks!" in my house). Man, I really should have listened to my intuition. This movie is what happens when you have a cool concept, make it for the lamest audience possible, and call it a day. Seriously, what were the people responsible for this thinking and how were they given a budget to make it reality?

The biggest problem this movie has are the wholly unlikable characters. You have the moppy depressed one, the drug user, the typical insufferable teenage girl, and the lame male best friend, each one more awful than the next. All of them are drug users and alcohol drinkers, so that was an huge put-off for me. But then the movie wants you to constantly jump time frames and locations, so that you're wondering if what you just watched was happening in real time, a version of the past, a version of the future, or none of the above? If it weren't for their acting, which was actually really well done, these characters would have sealed what was an already unwatchable film. But you know what they say about people with unnaturally colored hair? Yeah, that's what you're going to be seeing for an hour and a half. I should have turned it off as soon as I saw it.

The only reason I'm giving this movie any stars are; A. The acting- talent is talent, and despite how much I disliked every single character, they actually did a great job with the trash script they were given.

B. The "game" itself is actually really dope looking, and when the center sphere starts rotating it actually looks really slick.

DO NOT waste your time on this movie. It is not even recommended to the most forgiving of horror movie fan, let alone the general public. It has almost no redeemable qualities. Luckily, it's the type of movie that will be ignored and forgotten by most people.

I can't in good conscious recommend this movie to anyone.