Chain Letter

Chain Letter follows a group of interchangeable high school friends as they receive (and delete) a chain email and are subsequently knocked off one by one by a chain-wielding maniac, with the film, for the most part, detailing plucky survivor Jessie Campbell’s (Nikki Reed) ongoing efforts at solving the mystery behind the letter. (There’s also an absolutely interminable subplot revolving around the dimwitted detective, Keith David’s Jim Crenshaw, assigned to the case.) There’s little doubt that Chain Letter opens with a fair amount of promise, as filmmaker Deon Taylor, working from a script cowritten with Diana Erwin and Michael J. Pagan, kicks the proceedings off with an irresistibly brutal, Saw-like sequence that instantly captures the viewer’s interest. From there, however, the movie morphs into a progressively tedious thriller that boasts few compelling attributes – with Taylor’s relentlessly ostentatious directorial choices draining the energy from the movie’s various kill sequences (ie enough with the strobe effect, already). (It doesn’t help, either, that the filmmaker skimps on the gore in such moments, which lends the movie a demonstrable what’s-the-point-of-all-this-exactly sort of feel.) Chain Letter‘s progressively unwatchable atmosphere is perpetuated by the presence of hopelessly one-dimensional characters and the inclusion of palpably pointless subplots, with, in terms of the latter, virtually everything involving David’s dunderheaded character bringing the narrative to a dead stop (eg there’s a painfully drawn-out interlude in which Crenshaw speaks to a man who may or may not know the origins of the killer’s chains). The end result is one of the most disastrously underwhelming and incompetent horror flicks to come around in quite some time, which is a shame, really, given the presence of such noted genre staples as Brad Dourif, Charles Fleischer, and Betsy Russell within the supporting cast.

1/2* out of ****