The Den (2014)

the audience applauded

Sadly Over-hyped

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Everything about this movie is dumb. As in D-U-M-B.Let me re-spell that. DUMB - just in case you didn't catch it the first time. STOOPID works too.Right off the bat the movie lets us know it wants to be dumb. They couldn't think of anything better, more rational or logical than have the main character get a whole bunch of money from some moronic fictional company to do something NOBODY would hire anyone to do, especially not a useless L.A. bimbo: chat with a bunch of people online. That would be like spending money for a study to find out why people go to McDonald's and what they do there: they bloody eat. "Could you pay me tons to watch baseball games and the NBA?" That sort of thing. "Hey, I found this company that's willing to pay me make a study of what alcohol does to people!" Yes, companies can hardly wait to throw away money on useless things! But that's the least of this turkey's problems.I hoped this was a supernatural, nifty thriller a-la "Unfriended" from which it borrows the basic set-up. But it turns out to be just another anti-intelligent modern serial-killa-thrilla with omnipotent sadists who seem to have more super-powers and abilities than all of Marvel's stupidly clad clowns combined. If only the producers of this dross had hired that writer of said film to help out with this lame script which was obviously written by zombies who treat their viewers like, well, zombies. You didn't feel like a zombie watching this? Well, I did.The cretinized conspiracy offered here in the usual cretinous manner is a very absurd, undoable, extremely far-fetched and intelligence-insulting joke, almost like a prank being played on the viewer. In "Hostel" the conspiracy had a realistic logic to it: there are sadistic people out there and they'd pay lots of money to be able to torture people at their own time, free of any legal hassles, and without having to hunt down their own victims: the murders are perpetrated in a far-off place - and certainly not against cops and even detectives like here! (I was half-expecting a celebrity or a country's president to be kidnapped and shot for fun.) In "Hostel" things are done hush-hush, discreetly, unlike in this silly turkey, which is why that movie is chilling, because it is grounded in reality, because it seems like it CAN happen. This bomb however is grounded in a crapcake garden (where t**ds grow out of the grass along with the poop-stained script) which is why none of it is effective. One of the things that make this movie DUMB beyond words is that this kind of conspiracy would require dozens of people involved, in which case it couldn't remain secret for longer than 10 seconds: yes, the FBI would find out about it pretty quickly. And no, they wouldn't all end up in the "den" as prisoners because in the real world (that world that has nothing to do with this malarkey) these sadistic losers wouldn't stand a chance of running such a site longer than 5 minutes. Because no vast conspiracy can remain secret for very long: that's just human nature. The more people are involved in something large yet clandestine, let alone extremely illegal, the more chances rise exponentially that someone either screws up or starts talking. This goes especially for a conspiracy that involves mentally unstable sociopaths - rather than scientists and bureaucrats or what have you.I mean, come on, people, ISIS only wish they had this kind of organizational skills! ISIS are nowhere nearly as organized and master-mind-brilliant as this absurd outfit and yet they have the western world by the caj-ones. So what kind of cosmic power do these knuckleheads have that they can organize a venture of this magnitude - simply to run an internet site! That's their motive for all this? You gotta be kidding me. And people actually get into this...That's their motive? To run a sadistic site - which you ANYWAY can fake these days with CGI and clever editing, especially given the kind of enormous budget this ridiculous organization seems to work with. (Again, ISIS is jealous.) Why risk killing all these people for a quick buck (the revenue stemming from presumably 1000s of site users - at least one of which will report the site to the cops) when all of those can be easily faked - as this movie, for example, shows (badly though), and as all the other thrillers show. Some people are so gullible they will believe "Star Wars" is real, let alone a fake snuff film.In other words, the people who run this organization are so THICK that they would jeopardize everything by actually attacking and killing cops and detectives? Even after they kill or abduct one person from someone's circle of friends - which means the cops start an investigation - rather than WITHDRAW and decide to harass someone else they actually go out and kill the cops too! (And they kill them so easily. As if cops and detectives go alone when entering premises where extreme danger might be lurking. This writer has seen way too many Dirty Harry flicks.) This is so asinine that even the tiniest thriller-fan amoeba should feel its intelligence is being insulted. The conspiracy goes so deep that one of the killers just waltzes inside the pregnant woman's house and harasses her a short while after her house is swarmed by the police. (The usual nonsense: a conspiracy that MUST go all the way to the White House, probably. Is Obama in on this too?) Speaking of which, WHY did they not kill that woman and the unborn child? Are they implying that this organization has MORALS, boundaries they won't cross? Because certainly the reason couldn't have been the approaching police sirens, because a slice of the knife lasts just a second. The movie contradicts itself in the dumbest way possible.The main character said she hates cats (an unforgivable sin) so I was hoping half-way through the film that cat-lovers were the ones torturing her. Even THAT would make a lot more sense and would certainly be at least original rather than this "Hostel" rip-off premise which sponges off all the dumb all-powerful thrilla-killa cliches that'd been used tons of times, especially in recent years during which the thriller genre had sunken to new lows. The movie does manage to top its own conspiracy nonsense by allowing the puny, skinny, tiny 50-kilo female protagonist to kill two of these clowns and to badly hurt at least two more. That in itself is a contradiction, because if they're as powerful and cunning as they'd been shown previously - even killing cops and detectives with total ease - how the hell do they get impaled, stabbed and killed by one of their harmless victims?I hope films can't get any dumber than this. But every time I said that before, someone came up with an even more moronic killa-thrilla. Despite this seeming like an impossible mission, I do not doubt that there are even dumber new thrillers out there. The future looks bright for fans of garbage.

"The Den" is a web cam chat web site. Elizabeth (Melanie Papalia) actually gets a grant to talk to people on the web site as some sort of human behavior study. In doing so, she witnesses a snuff film and someone takes control of her computer. As people she knows seem to disappear, Elizabeth becomes more worried and desperate.This is another hand held camera production. It takes 10 minutes for something unusual to happen. There were some decent scenes, but there was also too much jerk the camera around for realism to suit me.A horror film aimed at teens.Parental Guide: F-bomb. sex. male nudity.

It's like a fourth horror movie that involves web chat or social chat/gathering online, ending up in murders. Nothing new.That said, in the beginning, I had some hope and the movie wasn't exactly awfully produced with awful acting working in its favor. BUT, it goes downhill the moment director starts introducing the wonders of hacking taking over everything in protagonist's life. Even the cops can't track these amazing hackers (yes, the same agencies like NSA, tapped into our computers can't track down hackers killing people).Apart from Hollywood hacking, you lose all interest in the killers who are shown in full view wearing generic masks trying to look scary while killing in some of THE most mundane manner. I've seen more horrifying deaths on Liveleak.Overall, movie didn't do anything new and failed to bring something new to the genre of "social chat turning into murder", which is already stale after like 3-4 movies.I am giving it 3 cause the protagonist isn't a bad actress and did her job most of the time, convincingly.Also, I was going to watch Allied, no idea why I decided to watch a boring "horror" movie instead. I regret everything.

For example, when she calls her friend at her house across town to warn her of the intruder: first of all, COME ON!-- who leaves their back door unlocked for anyone to come in when they weren't even doing anything out back to begin with? Secondly, no one would be so defensive about the warning to get out of the house, coming up with the ever-typical response, "What are you talking about? WHO'S in my house?" If someone got a warning like that, that person would be freaked out immediately and be out of there in a New York minute. To make it even MORE unrealistic, she turns around, worried, when she hears something after the warning over the phone, saying, "Hello?" This one's definitely sub-par.