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Unfriended | 2015 | R | - 6.7.10
One year ago a shaming video posted online about a teen girl (Heather Sossaman) went viral and caused her suicide. On the anniversary of her death, she seems to have returned to her online accounts, tormenting six friends until she can find out who posted the original video. Also with Will Peltz, Matthew Bohrer, Courtney Halverson, Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Jacob Wysocki and Renee Olstead. Directed by Levan Gabriadze. [1:22]
SEX/NUDITY 6 - A still shot from a video shows a girl in a micro-mini skirt lying face down on the ground and drunk with her legs spread (we see full bare legs and a glimpse of underwear) and Sharpie pen markings depict a large arrow on one thigh that point to her crotch, along with a sexually explicit phrase (we see this scene a half dozen times).
► At an outdoor party in a video, a drunk teen girl (please see the Substance Use category for more details) shouts for everyone to see her buttocks and the shot cuts to the girl face down in the dirt with her lower half clothed only in panties (we see full bare legs and thighs and her buttocks covered with blood and feces and rape is suggested) while another teen girl in the video laughs at her.
► A dimly lit scene shows a teen girl wearing a long shirt and panties and a teen boy only in briefs as they kiss briefly and he lies on top of her on a bed (the scene ends and sex is suggested). A shirtless teen boy points a wide sword at a screen and demands a teen girl to remove her shirt in an online chat; she opens the shirt to reveal her sternum and slight curves of her breasts on either side (we see panties and bare legs) as she touches her crotch briefly and says, "I'm sexy when you're violent" and he laughs; she pulls one buttock through the leg of her panties and squeezes it with one hand in close-up.
► A "Live Video Cams" ad online displays only torsos and hips of women wearing T-shirts and panties while wriggling and dancing; one woman raises a shirt slightly to show the bottoms of her breasts. Teenage girls wear tight tops and short-shorts that reveal bare arms, some cleavage, and fully bared legs.
► A teen boy jokingly tells a teen boy and a teen girl in a chat conversation to stop looking at porn, but they are not looking at anything at all; the first boy makes a sexual remark and another teen boy calls out, "I told you not to show your boobs!" (we see no breasts).
► A teen girl in a 6-way video chat cries and screams, admitting that she had sex with one of the teen boys who is on screen, while her boyfriend, also in the chat, shouts and curses; the non-boyfriend announces that everyone is having sex with the first girl (using crude terms). Two photos shared via video chat show a shirtless teen boy with a clothed teen girl sitting beside him while another teen girl in the chat shouts at the teen boy, who is in the chat because he is cheating on her with the girl in the picture.
VIOLENCE/GORE 7 - The movie is set as six dimly lit chat windows on a desktop computer screen at night, with some grainy and blurred images as the dialogue jumps between the windows, interspersed with Skype messages, Facebook posts, Instant Messaging and Gmail messages across the movie screen.
► A teen girl in a cellphone video's long shot, outside a high school, holds a handgun at arm's length with both hands and shoots herself in the head with a loud bang and falls hard and we hear that the girl committed suicide a year ago because she was shamed by a video depicting her as drunk, raped and incontinent.
► A teen boy digs around his messy room as he talks on video chat and to his friends, his chat window freezes just as we hear a loud bang and the boy has one hand deep into a running blender, sending blood over the top, onto the counter and onto the walls as he screams; his chat window goes blank and the other teens shout, scream and cry. We hear a loud bang in a video chat window and see a teen girl lock herself into a bathroom with her computer; we then see a large electric curling iron thrust repeatedly down the girl's throat from off screen as her eyes roll back into her head and the curling iron smokes and a still shot of her body with the curling iron stuck down the throat has a caption: "Looks like she finally STFU." A frightened teen girl types in an electronic message that her boyfriend posted a shaming video online of a girl who later committed suicide and a dimly lit chat window shows the boyfriend sitting at his desk as a long carving knife comes from off-screen and sticks into his right eye up to the hilt, with blood flowing around his eye and face as he screams, falls, and the window goes blank.
► In a group video chat, someone contacts six teenagers by using a dead girl's Facebook and Skype accounts, demanding to know who posted a shaming video; the six teens shout, curse and cry as they attempt to block the person contacting them, and then call police, who never arrive; one of the teens becomes drunk (please see the Substance Use category for more details) and waves a handgun at his computer camera while threatening to kill whoever is contacting them.
► A loud knock occurs in a chat video window and a teen boy there shouts angrily that he has a gun as one user in the chat tells four teens that they must play a game or die and that they must admit to illegal and sexual activities (please see the Sex/Nudity category and the Substance Use category for more details); one teen receives a fax, sends it to another teen by email and they both shout in fear as another teen demands to see it (it states that if the message is revealed another teen will die) as a handgun comes from off screen into a chat window and fires into the face of the teen who had the gun originally, and he falls off-screen (we see only a bright flash and hear the bang).
► A teen girl in a group chat/text session receives a message that she should be killed as we hear a loud bang that scares all the chat teens and the girl's chat window freezes; it unfreezes and we see her fall off screen as a male in a dark T-shirt, only arms and chest in the shot, turns off her computer camera and one of the other teens shouts that the missing girl has seizures as she calls the police, who never arrive.
► A group chat participant confronts a teen girl about posting a shaming video and she denies it until the other participant sends her a Facebook page that shows where she posted the video, which went viral and resulted in a teen girl's suicide; the participant types on the page that the girl is a murderer and dozens of Facebook friends unfriend her as we hear a loud bang, the teen girl screams and falls out of her video chat window, and the window goes blank (she is presumably dead).
► We see a girl's buttocks covered with blood and feces (rape is suggested) while another teen girl in a video laughs at her. We see an old photo of a teen girl several times and she is dressed in black leather pants, shoes and jacket, hanging from a doorframe, dead with her head and black hair hanging to hide her face and we see a message several times that says, "Do Not Answer Messages From the Dead." Teenagers online receive copies of Facebook posts and emails to a teen girl who committed suicide a year ago and the messages to the girl include "Kill Urself" and "Why don't you kill urself" many times, while in real-time someone text-messages and Skypes six teenagers that if they try to hang up on him or cut the Internet connection they will all die (this causes them to cry, scream, and curse and one teen shouts that the dead girl deserved to die, because she was mean and a bully and another teen agrees).
► A teen boy admits to giving a date rape drug (Rohypnol) to a girl before raping her and forcing her to have an abortion. A teen girl threatens a teen boy by saying that her father will kill him and will come to his house to fight him; another teen girl threatens an unknown chat participant with, "I'll knock the trash out of your ears!" and also says that she will burn alive whomever is starting eating-disorder rumors about her. We hear that a teen defaced the grave of a dead teen girl.
► A teen boy jokes about hearing flatulence but his friends (and we) hear nothing.
LANGUAGE 10 - About 97 F-words and its derivatives, 1 obscene hand gesture, 9 sexual references, 36 scatological terms, 18 anatomical terms, 15 mild obscenities, 1 derogatory term for African-Americans, 1 derogatory term for homosexuals, name-calling (stupid, crazy, dumb, creeper, creeper Skype guy, genius, floozy, trashy, bully, murderer, Mrs. Long Dong), stereotypical references to teen boys, teen girls, unsupervised teens, teen sex, alcoholic fathers, cyberbullies, mean girls, technology addicts, exclamations (shut-up), 3 religious profanities (e.g. OMFG, GD), 14 religious exclamations (e.g. Oh My God, My God, I Swear To God, Oh God).
SUBSTANCE USE - A teen boy admits to giving a date rape drug (Rohypnol) to a girl before raping her and forcing her to have an abortion, a teen boy admits to selling marijuana and having $800 from its sale stolen, a teen boy smokes marijuana in close-up and drinks a beverage out of a blender (the drink turns his face red), two men on a video cam smoke marijuana cigarettes and giggle, and a girl holds a glass bong tube near her face (she does not smoke, but smoking drugs is implied). A teen boy drinks several small cocktail glasses of liquor and slurs his words (his friends say he is drunk), pictures depict teen girls holding beer bottles, a video titled "Drunk Laura" shows a teen girl drinking beer while yelling and passing out facedown, and a teen boy tells a teen girl that their fathers go out drinking together.
DISCUSSION TOPICS - Internet safety, cyber bullying, teen drinking and drug use, teen sex, suicide, murder, revenge, justice.
MESSAGE - Cyber bullying can lead to suicide and murder.
CAVEATS
Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.
We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.
Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.
Saturday Night - 4.4.10
Piece by Piece - 1.2.3
Joker: Folie à Deux - 7.7.10
Monster Summer - 1.4.3
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