Slenderman

       Slenderman is about 4 girls who, one night, decide to jokingly watch a supposed cursed video attached to a demon/phenomenon known as Slenderman. After watching the video, one of the girls disappears and the other 3 begin to experience strange occurrences. As far as plot goes, that's about as far as I can go without spoiling anything, not that you would ever watch this movie anyway.
       Take any teenage horror movie that's been released in the past five years and think about what their plots consisted of. We can group these movies into a horror subgenre that we will call "Boogey Man" movies. All of these movies have contained the same formula. A group of teens enter a paranormal environment where they unknowingly unleash a demon or some form of paranormal being. Some of them die and the ones who do survive have to live with trauma and the finale usually consists of a final showdown where they find out how to cast away the demon. This is a formula for a lot of teen horror movies and scary movies in general, but that doesn't mean that all of them are bad. Usually, the ones who try to expand upon the formula, even a little bit, tend to be more enjoyable, at least for me. Now in Slenderman's case, this wasn't what happened. What I got was an on-the-nose formulaic horror movie with one-dimensional, unrelatable teen characters who only serve as POV conduits for the jump scares that are sprinkled throughout the movie, but because of the popularity of its subject, its expected to be somewhat enjoyable. It wasn't.
       In all honesty, I went into this movie with an open mind, but I still reserved a little bias for a number of reasons. 1) the popularity of its subject is severely outdated 2) it's trying to capitalize on a phenomenon that doesn't have as much appeal as the studio thought it would 3) from the trailers, it looked like they changed some aspects of the subject itself and 4) well, it just looked cringey. The movie delivers on all of these. This movie, I think, was in development for a while and it feels like they just pushed it out to the public just so they could stop worrying about it.
       Besides all the material that's easy to hate, there is more to this movie that just doesn't work and it starts with the writing. There is barely a setup to the environment that these characters are living in. The beginning has our characters walking down a hallway having cliche conversations that old people think teens actually talk about. Some guys meet up with them and engage in more cringey conversation with cheesy dialogue. Later that night, the girls meet up to watch porn (so relatable, I know) and this is where we get our first mention of Slenderman. They watch a creepy video and crap hits the fan. From here on out, it's basically a boring jumpscare fest with little story advancement. Just a girl walking around a hospital for 2 minutes straight with a lazily edited montage of scary imagery you could find by typing the word 'scary' into Google. Also, remember how I mentioned there usually being a finale to these types of movies? There really isn't one in this movie and it ends in a way that'll make you feel empty. Formulaic movies can be enjoyable, but another problem with this movie is its execution. While I was watching this movie, I found myself wondering if there was any potential to begin with. There is, but this potential is never realized because of the execution which includes elements like dialogue and pacing. You know those memes on Facebook where a person forces a robot to watch a show or a piece of media and then has the robot write a script along the lines of what they were just forced to watched hours of? This movie feels like someone forced a robot to watch a bunch of not-so-great scary movies and then had it write its own scary movie script.
       However, there is one redeeming quality to this movie. Joey King is a good actress and deserves better than movies like this. The other main actresses were also really good, but King proves to be the more noticeable talent
       This movie could've joined the ranks of Truth or Dare in terms of movies that are laughably bad, but this movie is too boring for anything to be laughable. Slenderman tries to capitalize on a viral trend that has been dead for a couple of years and its obvious that even the producers were tired of making it. This will likely end up in the bargain bin at Wal-mart, but if it comes up on Netflix then I would recommend that you still not waste your time with this movie. 1/10