SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
Synopsis: A boy commits suicide, and then it seems to be catching... whoever was the first person to come near the last dead body then kills themselves shortly after too, and the first person to come near their body, and so on. C-C-C-Combos ensue!
Scariness Type: General dread and the occasional sort of jump scare.
Rating: 3/5 Necronomicons. I think. The movie is no longer on Netflix so I can't check my rating and it's been almost a week since I saw it.
Body Count: 9 in the movie, and 6 more in the credits! Those are some unhealthy credits.
Fun Fact: This movie also has teenagers who irrationally hate a fellow teenager who lost a parent through no fault of their own. Why is that a thing? In this movie it makes more sense though, it's a religious thing.
Best Moment: It's never super clear how the people are being killed, except in a couple of scenes. The one that stands out a bit is when the main character's mom is slain by the evil force, and I kind of liked how that worked. It didn't make a
lot of sense (and did nothing to explain the guy who hanged himself earlier...), but it hinted at some kind of mental trickery going on and that she thought what she was drinking was a nice healthy beverage.
Worst Moment: Maybe not a moment, but I felt like the cousin who just shows up and acts surly was a needless addition. Maybe that's why the Hebrew Hammer set her on fire. Spoiler! She did have some significance, but anything she had to say could've been said by the guy whose cousin she was, who was actually an important character. And she was surly.
A Suspension Bridge Too Far: Nothing really took me out of the movie here that I can remember. There was one very low-speed car crash that set the car on fire, but there was ghostly intervention involved, it's not like they were actually suggesting that car crashes do that by default.
Horror Tropes: It's good to be the hero... this evil force that wiped out everybody else it was attacking in 2 seconds flat spends the last 15 minutes of the movie slowly pursuing the hero. Not because she had any sort of special skill or anything, it just came after her much more slowly out of respect for her star status.
My Take: There's a twist at the end of this movie, as there should be in any movie according to me, but especially horror movies. But the twist here (I'm not doing a very good job spoiling these movies, am I? I only spoil when it's necessary!) is of the lesser variety. Twists come in 2 flavors - ones that send you back through the whole movie, re-evaluating everything you've seen in one amazing revelation (always kind of lame when they flashback to do all the mental work for you, though); and ones that don't change your view of the previous events, they just make the rest of the movie take a new direction. This is the latter kind, and since it comes about 30 seconds before the movie ends, it doesn't change much. It does make it a pretty depressing conclusion (and possibly the end of the entire human race, depending on exactly how magic works - spoiler!). But despite that, it's still something fun, because for a minute or so you think things are resolved in a nice way, then they go down hard. Anyway, overall this movie was okay. Didn't blow me away, but it all made sense and worked alright. I found the doppleganger monsters to be ineffective. They did the usual stretched face, black eye type of stuff you get in a lot of modern horror movies, but just didn't pull it off in a way that really creeped me out at all.
The Lesson: Stay away from books. They're evil.
