Last modified on Mon 26 Apr 2021 09.03 EDT
Of all the awfulnesses rained down on us by coronavirus, down the list in 457th place is the return of the found-footage movie, back on our screens in the guise of the Zoom-call film. Last yearâs nifty little chiller Host was a masterclass in how to do it: a subgenre high. Much less satisfying is this gimmicky and derivative pandemic thriller directed by Will Wernick about a drunken virtual party that gets out of hand. There is absolutely no sense of it being shot in real time and a strong whiff of phoniness hangs over the whole thing.
Safer at Home Review: Friends Don t Let Friends Take Molly on Zoom
A video-chat party during shutdown goes south in this dull, implausible thriller.
Dennis Harvey, provided by
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Running time: Running time: 85 MIN.
Courtesy of Vertical Entertainment
One of the sleeper hits of the shutdown last year was Rob Savage’s British horror “Host,” a very short (just under an hour) and sweetly scary tale of friends whose weekly Zoom call during COVID quarantine gets crashed by an unwelcome supernatural visitor. It was, however, bound to be the exception which proved a preexisting rule: that found-footage thrillers remain a tapped-out genre, no matter if one in every 20 or so manages to squeeze some new life from the form.