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Overview
We come to a fairly new horror movie based on the found footage genre. This one uses web cam footage to show us the story and paint the horrific events. Will definitely make you check that your anti-virus is updated.
Our own genre choices are a combination of snuff film and internet horror. There’s quite a bit here that could interest hardcore horror fans. Of course, the term comes from a book that is about Charles Manson – so it all makes sense now.
An interesting fact for the movie is that the initial release was in Russia, two days before Christmas in 2013. It’s also a fairly short movie at about 1 hour and 15 minutes.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2503154
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Den_(2013_film)
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Transcript
The den. Ooh. Hey, we said that unison. That’s creepy almost.
[00:00:37] Rhys: Yeah. You
[00:00:38] Stephen: S do you find any weirdness about we’re doing a. Review of a movie that they get online, social media and chat, video chat, and we’re doing it through a video chat.
That just seemed a little meta for
[00:00:54] Rhys: I didn’t before,
[00:00:56] Stephen: but you might want to look behind you now. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, sorry. The den.
[00:01:02] Rhys: Yeah, it’s a us film. From 2013, it falls under, in my opinion, falls under two different categories of horror films. It falls under the snuff film category. And it also falls under a category.
I call internet horror.
[00:01:19] Stephen: And an offshoot of found footage in a lot of ways.
[00:01:23] Rhys: It is. Yeah. Snuff films. If you’re not, familiar with the term, you can find them in all kinds of movies video Drome S and man fear.com kill list eight millimeter. The concept is basically that somebody is actually killing someone and recording it.
And this is like a secret film. Killing the person. The term comes from a 1971 book by a guy named ed Sanders about Charles Manson. And they said that he was planning on making the a snuff film and in 75 there was actually a movie called snuff that apparently is really horrible. Isn’t not horrible.
Oh, I can’t stand it. Like really horrible, be acting and everything’s terrible, but it’s supposed to be a snuff film recorded by a motorcycle gang. So
[00:02:10] Stephen: the big back in the seventies are more big, I should say, underground big. I remember when we were younger, faces of death was a big thing and
[00:02:20] Rhys: yep.
And the whole series of those
[00:02:23] Stephen: yay
[00:02:24] Rhys: internet horror on the other hand is it’s horror. That’s based around a lot of times voyeurs to com. Voyeuristic camera work because you’re looking in on somebody through their web cam through their phone cam, something like that. And a lot of times it involves whoever’s watching has some sort of power over the people involved.
Again, fear.com unfriended, hashtag horror pulse. The J horror classic is one of the early ones. Cam is a recent one that came out recently. It was actually had a nice little twist to it. Friend requests 13 cameras, a movie from 2007 called look, the entire movie was shot on security cameras.
Which was an interesting twist, but that was pretty much the only interesting twist about that movie, but it’s still,
[00:03:13] Stephen: and then, anyone who likes something like paranormal activity may enjoy this it’s very similar or Blair, which going back to that sure. And we just recently saw the houses that October built very similar, but this is like you said, the focus on internet, social media, tight or which things get very
[00:03:32] Rhys: horrific.
Yeah. The visit here is a woman visiting a site. The movie was written by Lauren Thompson. Who’s done. Like three TV shows and Zachary Donahoe who also directed it. And he’s only ever did two shorts and this movie, so pretty good for a first major motion picture for a, in my opinion. Yeah.
[00:03:56] Stephen: Yeah.
[00:03:57] Rhys: The bizarre thing. There’s a lot of bizarre things about this movie, but the most bizarre factoid for me is that this movie released on December 23rd, 2013 in Russia. Wow. Yes. The initial release was in Russia for some, maybe they bankrolled it, but it’s listed as it
[00:04:19] Stephen: actually makes it way.
Creepier. Yeah. Yeah. That, that’d be interesting to look into it more because I know some of these things, they definitely are well-planned they want to see how the reaction’s going to be. And maybe there’s a segment of Russia that these movies do very well at. So it’s going to do well anywhere.
It’s going to do well there. I know the, I mentioned Phantom of the cinema yeah. A movie that there’s this one town up in Winnipeg that it’s huge. And they do festivals like Rocky horror picture show. So if I was going to do a similar movie, I’d want to put it there first, knowing that. So my guess would be that as long as it’s not some Bulgarian underground, that’s funded.
And so showing the Dawn’s buddies, no offense
[00:05:05] Rhys: to all of our fans in Bulgaria,
[00:05:08] Stephen: I was just off the top of my head. It could have been Romanian or California. They’re all the same.
[00:05:13] Rhys: This was a half a million dollar budget movie that gross 410,000. So they missed it by that
[00:05:19] Stephen: much.
[00:05:19] Rhys: It’s one of the shortest movies we have in any of the Susan’s at an hour and 16 minutes.
It’s barely a major motion picture, like length, but it squeaks under the wire. Yeah.
[00:05:32] Stephen: Considering the turtles just came out and it’s two hours and 37 minutes.
[00:05:36] Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. A little,
[00:05:39] Stephen: I think this may actually have better ratings at the moment. I’d have to actually compare that and see,
[00:05:43] Rhys: We had mentioned in an earlier, when we were talking in the bonus episode about the others, it was directed by Alejandro minibar.
And in 1996, he did a movie called tasteless. This one was, he was set in Spain and in Spanish. And you didn’t that movie? Sorry, go ahead. Oh, no, that’s fine. You just freaked me out because all of a sudden you were like here and then you weren’t
[00:06:11] Stephen: beard maybe. Oh gosh, maybe we just got hacked. We’re talking about the debt and this happens.
Okay. I’m shutting everything down. Okay. Cool.
[00:06:18] Rhys: Machines tastes. This came out in 1996 and it was about a college student in Spain who was doing a thesis and looked up some movie and found a college student that she knew. And it was a snuff film of that student being killed. And they find themselves trapped in this loop where they end up being the subject of another snuff film, which really made me think of this, whether or not that was an influence on, the creators of this film or not.
The similarities are a little uncanny. Yeah. This movie also played a role in the more popular film unfriended, which came out in 2014. It actually gets mentioned in, in passing and unfriended actually it’s similar to it where you have somebody hacking in it’s another internet horror, but it wait, it made way more money.
It cleared $95.2 million. Wow. It was a much more successful use of the genre than this one, but it was nice that, there was a nod of the head to the one that came before them. So it opened a mixed reviews. You’re not gonna find any awards. I don’t think that are going to be handed out to this.
Some people thought it was innovative. Some people thought it was more, same old stuff. I
[00:07:32] Stephen: can agree. I can agree with both of those. And I even thought it looked going through it. I’m like, I didn’t really see anything that jumped out at me like, oh, this light is pushing the. Type of movie forward the premise, how they got into it.
Okay. But that’s just part of the story. And then not that it’s all predictable, but there wasn’t anything that you didn’t expect.
[00:07:54] Rhys: They do a few things really well in this movie. But again, not unlike our last film, if you’re here looking for depth of message. There’s not a whole lot there.
At the end, there’s a little bit of, social messaging thrown into it. Yes. I noticed that even that feels like an afterthought,
[00:08:14] Stephen: It really did. It’s huh? Maybe more people will like it if we do this at the end. Yeah.
[00:08:19] Rhys: The movie stars, Melanie Pepe, Eylea, she plays Elizabeth Benton.
She’s in 40 other films. Most of them are television. So she was on travelers and suits and painkiller Jane and she had a part in supernatural and Smallville. She was also in smiley, which if you haven’t seen it is a more recent slasher film that’s out there. It’s pretty good. I remember that first slasher films go and she was also an extra terrestrial, the alien abduction film.
Oh, so she’s. New to the horror genre. Now I’m going to completely butcher this guy’s name. David slacked in Hoffman plays her a romantic interest. Damian Clark he’s only got 11 credits for television series and three shorts to his name. So he was an unknown and still to this day, a bit of an unknown
[00:09:13] Stephen: actor, at least one scene that is like reading it.
He’s probably huh? Yeah, I’ll do that scene. Do it again. Take two.
[00:09:23] Rhys: Yeah. Adam Shapiro plays max and he’s all over the place. Max has 91 credits, a lot of television. Andy, the Andy Dick show, Gilmore girls, medium Grey’s anatomy scandal, the mini product project bones. And he’s done voiceover for multiple versions of NBA to.
[00:09:44] Stephen: Wow. That’s cool. And that, let’s see all these people that have been on TV, probably their first big jump and this isn’t a completely horrible movie. It’s a good one from the drain on. And you just gave me some six degrees of separation because he was on supernatural. And so is the lead actress on supernatural.
And this guy was on Gilmore girls with Jared paddle. Lucky. So that’s what I meant. He was on Gilmore girls. We got some six degrees of separation going on there. So for me
[00:10:14] Rhys: the actual, I don’t want to say actual, but like one of the more successful actors in this was say CEDA, Erica, ADU, Lona who plays professor Sally winters.
And she’s been in 69 movies. Oh,
[00:10:28] Stephen: and I still didn’t recognize her.
[00:10:29] Rhys: She was in sex in the city, celebrity death match law and order and law and order SVU, the Sopranos blue bloods scandal, shameless glee. She had her stint on general hospital. She was on bones and CIS bull AP bio. She was in the haunting of hill house.
Oh, wow. Better call Saul. The Royal tannin bombs, righteous kill. And she did voiceover work in bully and GTA for
[00:10:58] Stephen: nice. Which they’re remastering by the way. I hear
[00:11:01] Rhys: yeah. For a virtual. I hear right. Yeah. Yeah. Then there’s an uncredited guy in the movie. They just list him as Skeeter. But he doesn’t show up in the credits, his name’s bill Oberst Jr.
And he’s been in a ton of movies. He got 197 credits. I don’t have them all listed here. He plays the creepy guy in all these movies. And he is his big claim to fame was he’s the take the lollipop guy, which was that Facebook meme that was out a long time ago where you’d give them permission to get on your Facebook site.
And they would do this whole thing where this super creepy guy is like stalking you on Facebook. And it like would show like the map to like your location and he’d be driving in the van to come get you. So it’s really ironic that he. Was in this basically like PSA about sharing your data online, and then it shows up in this movie about sharing.
He only plays a bit part, some topless guy masturbating in the movie,
[00:12:04] Stephen: so exactly who you’re talking about.
[00:12:07] Rhys: Yeah. But yeah, I thought it was really interesting that he was in there. That was interesting. Yeah. So this whole thing hits this kind of camera’s genre. Technology, we mentioned it with LACASA muda technology really is liberating for people who want to make movies.
This is a great way to get around, having to get a whole bunch of expensive gear, because the whole premise is that it’s playing out on the kind of cameras that we have, like right here and, on here and all over the place. So you don’t have to worry about spending 15 grand on a camera and stuff
[00:12:40] Stephen: like that.
Footage ones, they want to look like it’s coming from a CCT cam camera, your phone. So they can actually use that. And people are okay with that. And even a couple of the shows that we watch on TV it w it’s a paranormal caught on camera. They talk about scary and paranormal videos, and they’ve not been going to the studio, just doing it from home and they all have iPhones and they just set them up and sit in front of it.
And they’re doing a major TV show. With less budget and, people are just more used to it now from the last two years.
[00:13:11] Rhys: Yeah. I, and it’s interesting to me, it’s like this whole quality versus quantity argument about, we need content. We don’t even care how good it is.
[00:13:22] Stephen: And even then it at least said liberating because there might be some really good content.
They just don’t have the money to get it out, to make it look as flashy. And people are a little better used to the less flashy, but enjoying the content, Tik TOK and YouTube are great examples. There’s so many things that the kids watch that I’m like, this is stupid and it looks like crap, but they’re enjoying it.
Yeah.
[00:13:45] Rhys: Yeah. It’s one of those things where I’m being classically trained in like in the arts. You could go through. You had these masters school of art at the time, the people studied with DaVinci and people studied with Michael Angelo, and then as you get more and more people now, all of a sudden you have we’ve got cameras, so you don’t have to be able to paint pictures perfectly, come up with some other way of looking at the world.
And so now you have these schools of already of realism. You have impressionism, you have surrealism. And now we’re like in the post-modern age where there’s just so many people, there is no school to it. It’s just grab what you can and dump it in and just churn it out and what
[00:14:30] Stephen: Sticks. Yeah.
And this is a good example, $500,000 budget. We’ve had movies with less budget that we liked quite a this was actually high budget compared to a few of those.
[00:14:41] Rhys: It was. The movie begins, like someone’s just logging into this website and it’s Liz logging onto this site called the den and she basically gets pranked by this kid.
And that was in a dark room. Yeah. And he’s there’s a monster in my closet. And so she plays along and then all of a sudden there’s a jump scare and there’s a snap where he takes a picture of her just as she’s recoiling and, ha. And that’s how the movie starts, which I think was actually, one of the more masterful parts of the film was just that opening scene because it sets the tone and it lets you know exactly what you’re dealing
[00:15:22] Stephen: with and it sets the expectations a little off kilter because okay, they already showed us that.
So is this really going to be like that or not? It does a very good job at, there are so many movies that take too long at the beginning to say something, this boom. Did it well, and the kid was creepy and, which is one of the things they also show throughout this whole thing.
[00:15:45] Rhys: Yeah.
And it also makes the question like through the entire thing, what is actually real, right? Because there’s other scenes that come along that you’re like, oh my gosh, that just happened. And then it turns out it really did. And it was just some kind of prank. So the footage in this film is all made to look like it’s security cameras, laptops, phones and Liz, the main character is proposing to do a sociological study of this chat room phenomenon.
And she wants to propose, she wants to just sit there and like log on every day, meet as many people as she can, and try to glean some kind of data out of this massive set. And she’s proposing it to a college board who has The board’s made up of, I think, three old white guys, one very grumpy looking old white woman.
And then you have professor winners who is the young hip African-American lady, who’s on the thing. So she makes her pitch and her pitch is very professional looking. She’s got a whole PowerPoint presentation and everything. And then she’s just waiting to hear back from them. And at this point the camera on her laptop is on and you just get to see her weight.
You get to see chat messages come up from her boyfriend. You get to watch her check her emails. I really think it’s a. I mean on the one hand, it was good because it shows and reinforces, the situation she’s in, on the other hand, I think it’s also just a good excuse to show her running around in her underwear and stuff like that.
[00:17:23] Stephen: She gets done talking to them and then the next thing they show her getting up and she’s in her underwear. And it’s that’s the joke for the last year and a half. Yes. Was, this was done seven years ago
[00:17:33] Rhys: She gets a chat invitation from Dr. Winters and she finds out that she got the grant, the professor really had to push the board to give it to her because it’s not the kind of thing they’d typically, they would probably deem this as
[00:17:47] Stephen: silly something they don’t understand.
Exactly.
[00:17:49] Rhys: Yes. Yes. So then we find out that she has two guys on the line because she’s a. Getting a hold of people to let them know that she got the grant. And one of them is max, who you can tell from the way they communicate, wants to be more than just her friendly neighborhood, it guy. And she wants a friendly neighborhood. It guy for
[00:18:14] Stephen: max, I can totally relate to poor max. Yes.
[00:18:18] Rhys: I figured you could. Yeah. And then you have Damien who’s like the Rico suave, a in a cubicle working on some finance thing or something somewhere. And they’re like the actual romantic couple. He asks her if she wants to get together that night, but she’s really excited to start this project.
So she decides she’s going to stay in and Check out what all’s going on in the
One of the first things that I note is she goes into customized her experience and she, what are you interested in? And she clicks yes. To everything. Yes. And
[00:18:50] Stephen: extreme, which is a little weird, but okay.
[00:18:54] Rhys: It’s we are not responsible for anything you’re going to see from here on out.
And she’s yeah, fine. And the very first thing she gets is like some naked guys slapping his penis around it’s not the first thing, but it’s like the third thing. Yeah. Flipping through so she can expect a lot more of that. You would think as the thing goes on, she runs into a couple of guys who were trying to scam her into talking to them about sex in a very awkward way.
And then the one that I really love, she runs into this guy, who’s on a bike in New York city and she’s that’s amazing. And he’s yeah, New York for Gbaby. And then he gets hit by a car or something like that.
[00:19:35] Stephen: And I love that whole thing because right there is this minor statement. It’s this is what it’s like on the internet with people.
This is what you get. It was like 95% of everyone she talked to wasn’t worth, it were creeps of some sort just people like, oh, I have to be social and online. No, you really don’t because the worst of the worst conduct and the worst of your people come out, to, it’s not. Anonymous so well, not so anonymous, but you still don’t know who they are.
[00:20:05] Rhys: There’s a little interruption where she gets, food delivery or something like that. And the poor guy and the bike is damaged or whatever. And you find out what max has been working on for her. He’s got this screen capture program that’s running that will record her while she’s on. We not record her, but record what’s on her screen while she’s in the den.
Which, really handy and kudos to max. That’s some decent programming. I would assume that just something anybody could do well,
[00:20:32] Stephen: OBS does it.
[00:20:35] Rhys: Okay. Yeah. It’s hard to hear
[00:20:38] Stephen: and comment later, too, when they do the vid clean, it’s like these things look magical, but they actually all exist.
We’ve got this stuff out there, so it’s all available.
[00:20:48] Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. She has a friend named Jenny. They’re going to get together for the night, but of course they’re going to stay in. So they’re sitting around and they’re going through the den drinking beers and this person pops up as they’re going through.
And it’s a still picture. It’s not like an actual camera thing. And it’s a Paya girl asterisks 16. It pops up and, they have this kind of conversation and then they move on and then Liz has to use the bathroom. And while she’s away, pie girl, 16 pops back up and Jenny goes to interact with her a little bit.
And I believe she called her a bitch or something like that. Yeah. And it’s a little unsettling. It gets more unsettling because the scene with Jenny is over and the lights are now out. And you have Liz sitting there and someone’s locking, logging into the den while Liz is in her bed.
[00:21:47] Stephen: Yeah.
And I love that part because you saw a flash of command line code. So that was a very good signal. Oh, this is not good.
Not
[00:21:54] Rhys: right. Yes. And this is along those lines when I was talking to you about, you got to hide your level of disbelief, when someone hacks into your computer, there’s not suddenly some disturbance in a line of code flashes for a half a second, that doesn’t actually happen.
It’s a good way in a movie to indicate that somebody has gotten a hold of her login information,
[00:22:16] Stephen: at least this is better than Sandra Bullock in the net where they didn’t have any wires going to the computer.
[00:22:21] Rhys: Yeah. And this is a legit thing. Liz was trying to log in and got an incorrect password warning, and then she tries again, and there’s where your flash of code happens.
And that’s actually a legitimate phishing scheme is they will post up what looks like the login, collect your credentials, then let you through. And then when you’re not. When you’re not paying attention, they’ll come back. Which is exactly what happens as her camera turns on while she’s asleep, the chat window opens, it’s the avatar for Paya girls 16.
And she sounds like she’s in distressed or gagged. And it’s loud enough off of Liz’s laptop that she gets up and goes over to turn her computer off. And the next day she’s asking max about it and like your typical it fashion max is yeah, good. B,
is that something that could happen? Good, good. Then he says, it’s probably not, you know what, it’s probably not anything you’re too concerned with.
[00:23:20] Stephen: So what’d you write on both accounts, but in this case he was wrong,
[00:23:25] Rhys: right? This is the one to prove the rule. She goes to a coffee house and she’s logged in there, which, if you’re going to be doing this kind of shady stuff in the first place, you should definitely be doing it on your own secure network.
Not some public network in a coffee house, but yeah,
[00:23:40] Stephen: I’ve never actually heard of anyone getting hacked in a coffee shop. And that’s where everybody worries about it. My cousin once told me that she wasn’t worried about it because when she logs on, she sits far away from everybody. Oh, that helps. And
[00:23:54] Rhys: socially
[00:23:55] Stephen: distances.
I asked her if she would wear a tinfoil hat, the block, the signals.
[00:24:01] Rhys: Nice land. Yeah. I just bought a box, a whole roll of hat.
So she’s at the coffee house, flipping through stuff. She goes to get her order. And when she comes back, Paya girl 16 is connected with her and says they’re going to type because she has actually explained why here. She just says, she’s going to type. So it’s the solid picture and they’re going to type back and forth.
And she asked if they can be friends. Hi, a girl asks Liz if they can be friends. And Liz is sure. And then it cuts to this fetish scene of some guy being mistreated by. Dominatrix in black weather.
[00:24:45] Stephen: Yeah. And these made me laugh. Cause the, obviously this is probably part of the point and message, but it’s five videos in a row, all creepy, weird people and weird stuff.
And every guy is on there for sex in some way,
[00:24:59] Rhys: yeah. The movie then cuts to her actually having conversation with this nice lady from England whose boyfriend come through and plays like a little goofy thing. And then, okay, so there’s this really nice little section there. Boom. And you’re like, oh, okay.
I can connect with that. She finally found someone nice to talk to while she was here that conversation ends and she gets an email from professor winters asking her for an update while she’s responding to the professor, Damien calls up. And he’s trying to get her to go over to his place. And she keeps putting them off and it cuts to her being asleep.
And then you see her computer log on again and you’re like, oh, it’s happening again? And then the computer moves. Yeah. So whoever’s logged in is actually there and it moves over towards the bed and it like pulls back and you see this hand and it turns out it’s Damien, right? He’s yeah, I didn’t want to wait around.
And,
[00:26:02] Stephen: So we’ve got our second, oh my gosh, what’s going on? And it turns out to be a false red herring there. That’s the last one?
[00:26:09] Rhys: No, not quite,
[00:26:10] Stephen: but there’s one more. Okay.
[00:26:12] Rhys: They proceed to engage in adult entertainment and while they’re doing it someone logs into her account on the den records it, and then you see an email window pop up and you see the video being uploaded into the email.
You don’t really know who that was going to, but you do find out before the oh yeah. The next day, she’s having a conversation with her sister, a new character who is pregnant.
[00:26:43] Stephen: And I actually got her sister and her friend confused a little bit until I realized they were two separate characters. It wasn’t super clear.
They were separate.
[00:26:52] Rhys: While they’re talking, someone knocks on her sister’s door, the conversation ends, Liz continues to scroll through stuff. She talks to a Nigerian prince.
[00:27:01] Stephen: That was funny because the spam mails that everybody knows about now they’re going live. That one really did make me laugh, but that was my favorite.
[00:27:10] Rhys: Yeah. Then pie girl, 16 shows back up and ask her she’s like in the website. Or I’m sorry. She asks by girl 16, she’s liking the website and a pie girl. 16 says they like watching people and points out how they saw her and Damien having the sex the night before. And she seems really shocked by that as one, probably should be.
And then the camera kicks on revealing the girl from the avatar photo. She is bound and gagged and hyperventilating, and someone sled slams her head onto a table and then slices her throat.
[00:27:44] Stephen: And this is where you start to wonder, because they showed that earlier one where those people were playing Russian relay and it turned out to be a big joke.
That
[00:27:54] Rhys: actually happens later.
[00:27:56] Stephen: Oh, it does. Okay. It makes set up. I just ruined it for everybody. Oh,
[00:28:01] Rhys: it’s fine. But. She does get freaked out and she calls the police and like the cyber crime unit comes over cyber crime unit. And he is eh, it looked real. It’s a lot like the it guy could be, what are you going to do anything about it?
And probably
[00:28:21] Stephen: not. So what the heck is the cyber crime unit for?
[00:28:24] Rhys: So she starts, this is actually a brilliant thing. She goes through and she starts looking through Piatt girl sixteens friend list and connecting with them and asking if they know anything. And of course, most of them are just being creepy.
And then she comes across. One of the friend lists has this Russian roulette scene. Okay. That’s where it came in. This is the last of the red herrings because they go through and it’s a very intense thing. And one lady pulls the trigger and nothing happens. And the next lady pulls the trigger and her head explodes up behind her.
And then everyone at the table starts laughing, including the person who just shot themselves. So it’s enough to give her that maybe this isn’t a real thing. Maybe I’m overreacting kind of thing. She does ask max to look into it. And max is okay. But, I don’t know what I’ll find out, but,
[00:29:16] Stephen: This is the one part.
I wondered how he must be a super hacker to be able to get into this system and get the logs of one particular user. And I know they, somebody could probably do it, but it’s probably not the easiest thing.
[00:29:31] Rhys: Come on, Steve. He can make screen capture programs. He’s obviously a genius. Yeah.
[00:29:39] Stephen: That was the only one that was a little stretch, but I understand that for the story too, she
[00:29:44] Rhys: gets a hold of Damien who’s out of town.
And he’s you’re overreacting, it’s faked. And then he shared a video with her and if it hasn’t come through, but she gets a phone call and answers it and he gets mad and just.
[00:29:58] Stephen: Yeah, he was going to who’s outside going to his car and he just discussed, throws his phone over on the seat.
[00:30:06] Rhys: Yes. The video finally comes through and the video is of him being very cute and giving her a virtual tour of the zoo of whatever town he happens to be in for whatever business thing he’s doing. And she goes to call him and he comes on and starts talking to her. And here it’s just a recorded loop from a previous conversation they had.
And when she figures that out, it suddenly cuts to his apartment is completely empty.
[00:30:34] Stephen: And actually when he goes into his car, the previous scene, we see somebody in the backseat of his car.
[00:30:41] Rhys: If you do you have a really good eye because I didn’t see it the first time I saw it the same time.
[00:30:49] Stephen: Oh, okay.
Cause I actually caught it when he was in the car.
[00:30:53] Rhys: Yes. Because later she goes through and uses the video enhanced thing and you can see who’s in the backseat, but yeah, so that did happen. But if you’re not paying attention like Eagle and Steve, I got
[00:31:08] Stephen: you did one point time, take a drink, everybody.
[00:31:11] Rhys: So she’s this is really odd. She calls the police. The police show up, she shows up, they’re all like walking around, looking like what’s going on. And while they’re doing this you can watch it happen on Liz’s laptop, which somebody has hacked into and is running. Then it goes over and gets a hold of her friend.
And whoever is running her laptop informs Jenny that the camera’s broken on my laptop. Can you come over to my apartment? And Jenny’s sure, that’s fine. So she gets lured to the apartment while Liz is here arguing with the police and they’re like, we don’t know what to tell you.
It hasn’t even been 24 hours. So we can’t start a mission person’s thing while she’s doing that. Liz is at, Liz, Jenny is at Liz’s house. She follows the trail of breadcrumbs to the bedroom. And while she is there somebody with a bag on their head grabs her. And that’s not the end of Jenny, but it’s the last we see of her for a while.
Liz comes home and she’s talking to max about how Damien’s missing. She gets mad because he wasn’t able to all on his own say, solve the whole pie girl, 16 mystery. And then she hangs up and she’s napping when her sister calls and whoever is running her account answers. Yes. So her sister’s talking to whoever is running her account and we as viewers know this, but Liz does not right.
She wakes up and tries to get ahold of Jenny, no avail, obviously. And she gets this urgent message from professor winters. And it turns out that the sex tape that was recorded has been emailed to all the people on the grant board and a little depressed. Yes. The professor’s upset.
[00:33:06] Stephen: So do you think they were pissed after they saw it or after the fifth or sixth time they saw it?
[00:33:11] Rhys: So Liz goes back to her original strategy. Damien’s missing. She goes to Damien’s friend list and she gets a hold of one of Damien’s old school friends who gets mad that she got ahold of her and then like flags her and she gets booted from the dead. I don’t know what it said, 24 hours or something like that.
But she’s been put in Facebook jail as everyone likes to say.
[00:33:35] Stephen: And right here, I started thinking, cause I know a lot of people that freak out about the cameras there, there was some big thing going around and everybody was blocking their cameras, putting shutters on their cameras and covering them up.
And I’m laughing cause I’m like even to get the, your camera, they need to break into your computer in some way. And once they do that, there’s way more they can do than just look at your damn camera. People use the same password for 37 different accounts and then wonder what happened to their bank account.
[00:34:02] Rhys: And when you get to the end of this movie, cause I was doing, I was thinking along the same lines when you get to end of the movie and you see what this is all about. The people who are doing this would make more money. Just from stealing to data off of people’s computers, then this whole elaborate setup to torture people.
[00:34:20] Stephen: You know what I mean? But just, there’s people that’s their messed up, mine, whatever. Yeah. And now the crazy psychos are making money off of it. So it’s even better. Yeah. I suppose Leatherface needs to take some notes. That’s
[00:34:36] Rhys: right. Liz goes on to find another one of Damien’s friends gets a hold of him and he’s like talking to her and he had a link from Damien just the other day.
And she was like, can you send it to me? And here the guys like Rick Roellinger.
[00:34:47] Stephen: Yeah. And he loves him. He laughs and
[00:34:50] Rhys: yeah. Yeah. And right about here is where a Skeeter shows up in the in the video. So this is where she gets out her her magical video. Compression tool and starts to do video analysis of the last footage of Damien.
All right. Can you hang on just a second? Okay.
I could sing.
Oh, there it is. I got my hat
[00:35:21] Stephen: ready to break out in song.
[00:35:22] Rhys: So she gets out her video vid clean pro 2.4 and she starts looking at the video last footage she has of Damian. She uses the magical, enhanced feature which builds corruption, data, whatever that means,
[00:35:38] Stephen: which is questionable. She would have been able to recover that much, that well, but
[00:35:43] Rhys: yeah, but you can actually see in the backseat of Damien’s car, there’s a guy with bag on his head, very similar to the guy who took Jenny that she doesn’t know all about.
She tries to get the police there, not a whole lot of help. She gets a chat request from Damian, which leads to his this edited montage of clips from all of their chats were basically says that this guy’s hunting people on the site and there’s nothing she can do about it now. And. I thought that was actually a clever way of communicating.
If you have somebody’s whole big thing where you can communicate back and forth.
[00:36:23] Stephen: Plus also showing all this thing lately with the deep fakes and being able to take so much recorded material from somebody to get their face and their voice and splice them together with AI in that to make it like they really did say something, it puts into question, any video, any audio on TV, or it should put into question, some people,
[00:36:45] Rhys: the post-truth era of of data then it gives you a link and she clicks on it again.
Yeah. And then. In record time, this link white shirt, computer way faster than any thing I’ve ever seen
[00:37:06] Stephen: delete that amount of data. This is pretty much exactly how the ransomware nowadays works. Oh yeah. And I’ve had a couple people with my company have that problem that they click the wrong thing. And not necessarily even with work, but it literally bound up their whole computer and they were supposed to pay whatever.
And they ended up wiping it and losing a bunch of stuff rather than pay. But that really does exist. I know some people may not share that. So believe me, someone hacking your camera is small beets.
[00:37:36] Rhys: Yes. Do not click on links
[00:37:39] Stephen: there. Go see your basement in my wall. Go ahead. Hack my camera. All you want then.
[00:37:44] Rhys: She calls max over and max comes in clutch with it. Advice don’t click on links from people you don’t know. And there’s nothing I can do. There’s no data left. So she gets mad and kicks them out.
[00:37:58] Stephen: Yeah. What about your backup? She’s I don’t have one fix it. I can’t. You’re terrible.
Get out of here, us poor it, guys. Get that all the time. If we’re not magical, then we’re not
[00:38:09] Rhys: fix it. Fix it. Steve. She tries to get ahold of Jenny. Jenny says that she’s home and Liz goes and finds Jenny like in the bath tub with her wrists slit. And by the end of the scene, Jenny is still alive when Liz gets there.
But by the end of the scene, Jenny is dead.
[00:38:32] Stephen: Yeah, pretty horrific bloody water. She wakes up gasping and then passes away exertion.
[00:38:38] Rhys: So let’s get to gun and then decides to learn how to use it online
[00:38:45] Stephen: with other creepy videos. That guy was pretty hilarious. Yeah.
[00:38:50] Rhys: Here’s how you load it. I’m only going to put two rounds in here.
Right about here. The first time I saw this, I had made up my mind for sure. This was max. Huh? He has the skills to be able to do this, the skills to fake that he doesn’t know how to do it. He’s a jilted lover. It made all kinds of sense to me, spoiler alert. It’s not max. You’re totally wrong. It was feeling that way.
So that was a nice twist that. Let it fall into that. The jilted geek, a stereotype that so many movies do, right? Yeah. She gets a message about her sister and the killer is at her sisters and she gets to watch all of this footage. She’s called the police and everything, but like she’s telling her sister to get out and there’s the guy with the mask and there’s this creepy new element because someone else is filming it.
So it’s not just one guy. There’s two of them. And the guy knocks her sister down, has her all tied up and bound and like traces across her belly with this giant knife. And she’s probably she’s pregnant does not actually hurt. Because apparently that’s the line too far to cross.
[00:40:08] Stephen: I took it that he was going to, but luckily Liz called the police and said, I’ve got an intruder.
Here’s where I live and reported it. Like she was at her sister’s so they got there quick. Cause I heard the siren. So I took it that he was going to, but they stopped him. And there’s a good reason for that.
[00:40:25] Rhys: I meant the film creators. Oh, that was a line they didn’t
[00:40:29] Stephen: want to cross, which is probably good.
[00:40:32] Rhys: And my anterior, you got me that film the other day, that new French extremity film, that movie deals with a pregnant woman who’s being tortured and like very graphically. So it’s, that’s like its selling point and it’s one of those movies that just got ripped apart because of how graphic it is.
I can see that. And so this is the line the creators didn’t want
[00:40:55] Stephen: to cross, and it was a good way to. With the cops showing up and then the little twist here. Yes. At least there was no dog because that would have been
[00:41:05] Rhys: no dogs. That’s right. The dogs are all safe. The cops show up. And while they’re there interviewing Liz and, checking the house out, one of the cops starts asking Liz’s sister, all these inappropriate questions about where’s the dad, shouldn’t he be here?
And you’re like, that’s just a little creepy. Yeah. That’s inappropriate. And then the guy picks up a camera
[00:41:26] Stephen: the camera that they had set down the bad guys,
[00:41:30] Rhys: Evidence, and then starts recording and walks out. And now you realize, not only does this guy have a partner, who’s doing this guy has got someone on the inside with the police.
Yeah. So they’re putting Liz into protective custody and you get this shot of them driving Liz back to her apartment, but it’s from a dash cam of a vehicle following behind them. So the killer slash torture slash bad guys are still actively involved here. And it
[00:42:00] Stephen: was a great, the film way of keeping the found footage going.
No, it’s like a double twist thing. Yeah, that was pretty well done.
[00:42:08] Rhys: The police get back to her apartment. An officer goes in, checks, everything out, everything looks good. She can come in and then she’s I’m just going to grab a few things and then I’ll be right down. And he’s okay. And leaves.
And she’s in the apartment by herself. And her laptop goes off with a chat message and she answers it.
[00:42:28] Stephen: Some people won’t learn do they? I’m like, what the hell? So she got the grant very luckily because obviously she’s not super smart.
[00:42:38] Rhys: She’s not. And here’s that scene I was talking about. She hits the clicks on the link.
It’s for max it’s Max’s apartment, which has been turned upside down. And the cop enters the room. The detective from cyber crimes enters Max’s room because apparently he was thinking it was max. And he sees this laptop down there and he’s got his gun out and he puts his gun away and he walks over to the laptop.
Cause he can see that Liz is on the screen. And in my head I’m like clear the room. He does not puts his gun away. And mask face guy hits him with a sledgehammer and then Barry’s the sledgehammer in his head.
[00:43:15] Stephen: Yeah. And that there, I was like, man, why was that guy waiting? But it’s oh duh they’re cops.
They know it might’ve even been this guy’s partner in the car know came in. I was like, man, that’s pretty good actually.
[00:43:28] Rhys: Yeah. So she’s freaking out. And then she notices that the scene on her laptop mirrors, what she’s actually doing in real life. She realizes she’s being recorded right now and walks over to the air vent and finds there’s a camera in the air vent and right about then is when the power goes.
[00:43:49] Stephen: Always a good sign. Yes.
[00:43:51] Rhys: She goes to leave the front door and finds the police officer who was supposed to be escorting her chained in the most elaborate method. That would have taken a half
[00:43:59] Stephen: hour. I was looking for pinhead seriously. Yeah.
[00:44:03] Rhys: The guy’s chained up to like her porch and he’s all bloody and apparently dead.
So she slams the door and runs into the kitchen and grabs a knife, opens the door and there’s bag, head guy there. He comes in and then, weak women or whatever, the guy grabs her and lifts her off the ground, like by two feet and then throws her, like she weighs nothing
[00:44:28] Stephen: pretty skinny and psychos do have you see them like chimpanzee strength sometimes.
[00:44:33] Rhys: He’s a big guy. Apparently he’s tall for sure.
[00:44:37] Stephen: They eat meat.
[00:44:39] Rhys: He gets a hold of her and starts dragging her closer to him. She turns around and knives him in the belly and then proceeds to just go haywire and just hack. So she takes them out. Yeah. Good on her. Yeah. Then she runs out of the house, takes off and she’s running down the road.
She stops to look at like her injuries and you hear this truck and it runs into her and there’s a bag face on the front of the truck, which is just weird. It was a really weird, yeah. Okay. She got hit by a vehicle. I get it. But with the F with the face, at the end of that scene, I,
[00:45:15] Stephen: yeah. And it’s one of those, like we were saying before, don’t stand next to the pit where you just killed the alien grabber creature, go away.
Don’t stop and look at your minor injuries because your life is on the line. That’s
[00:45:29] Rhys: right. Keep going. The movie now transitions from snuff hill slash internet horror, straight into torture porn from here on out. The rest of the movie feels like it’s saw, or it feels like it’s hostile. Any one of those movies where someone’s captured and putting some factory abandoned factory and, there’s chains and people are bound.
That’s exactly what the rest of this movie feels like. So
[00:45:53] Stephen: I haven’t said it’s pretty typical. It seems the same template.
[00:45:58] Rhys: Yeah. It shifts gears really hard, into that slot. And I still haven’t made up my mind whether that’s a good thing or not originally, the movie was supposed to end when she gets hit with the.
Oh, everything that’s tagged on afterwards is what was actually the theatrical release. Oh,
[00:46:15] Stephen: I actually, I think I would have not enjoyed it as much if it ended, when she got hit the truck. Cause it made everything seem, who cares regardless of good or bad and 10 minutes or so it, yeah, it does it, you don’t have a complete story until that at least
[00:46:34] Rhys: I honestly think they probably would have left it at the end, except they looked at the clock and it was like, this is only an hour long.
[00:46:41] Stephen: We have a afterschool special right now.
[00:46:43] Rhys: So she finds herself chained to a wall. She has a GoPro stapled to her head
[00:46:50] Stephen: to Indiana Jones with his hat.
[00:46:52] Rhys: I was thinking like martyrs, but not like those biggest staples. This is like staple gun kind of status. Which she finds too painful to remove.
There’s a laptop there and it would appear that Damian is still alive and he’s been there for a long time and he’s chatting to her through the window. She’s confused. She’s trying to figure out what goes on is going on. She gets a chat call from max. She answers that. And you find out that it’s not max because max is tied up to a chair.
And while she watches her, boyfriend’s no, this was recorded. I’ve already seen this. Then he gets kicked off the chat and someone wraps a bag around Max’s face and just holds it there until max stops
[00:47:30] Stephen: breathing. So they’ve, they’re racking up quite a big body. Count of all her friends. Yes,
[00:47:36] Rhys: pretty much everyone, but her sister, nobody else survives.
She’s sitting there trying to get herself Unchained when she gets another chat message from Damian. She clicks on it for some God forsaken reason just in time to see them basically drag Damien off to his death.
[00:47:55] Stephen: And I think actually right there, I wouldn’t believe she’d just keep clicking this stuff and I don’t think it would have ruined anything to just have it pop up because we know they’re in control.
They can do whatever. So just to have it pop up in play, but that’s a minor thing, but
[00:48:11] Rhys: yeah. What P American films, we got to show you everything. You got to explain it all.
[00:48:16] Stephen: Let me be Joel head one more time. Yeah.
[00:48:19] Rhys: She’s trying to pull the chain loose. The door opens up and income. Somebody with it took me a long time to figure out what it was.
I think it was a machine.
[00:48:26] Stephen: Yeah, I think so because it doesn’t, she grab it, then she gives me it
[00:48:30] Rhys: does. But she manages to, kudos to her chain around the neck and take them out. She
[00:48:37] Stephen: doubled up the chain and swung it to hit them with it. It’s that’s perfect. That’s a weapon. I don’t see use too often.
And that’s all she had. And that was very smart of her, actually. Everything else she did was dumb, but that’s all good. She just can’t stop clicking on that. She had been fine. Social media, she’s trained.
[00:48:56] Rhys: She is she finds keys, gets her ankle thing on uncut. And then she heads out into the darkness that is this abandoned factory, wherever she is.
And of course, she’s being hunted. There’s people running around after her, over the course of the whole thing. She takes out an alarm starts as she’s going. She finds her. Full of blood. And that’s when I actually realized that what she had was a machete, because there’s a camera shot from a distance and you can see her standing there holding it,
[00:49:30] Stephen: her Laura Croft pose her
[00:49:32] Rhys: Laura Croft pose.
Yes. But people are hunting her and she’s like choosing to hunker down and, be quiet and try to out with them. And, she’s gone from playing a first person shooter to playing a stealth mission game.
[00:49:47] Stephen: I kept waiting for Batman actually to swoop in.
[00:49:51] Rhys: Yeah. Somewhere along the lines, she loses the machete, but she gets a hold of a hammer.
One of the guys. I think it’s the guy she took the hammer from. She cracks him in the face with it, peels his mask up and asks where Damien’s at. And the guy’s he’s not here, but when you look at the guy, he looks like he’s
[00:50:08] Stephen: 12. Yeah. Yeah. I thought so too. Go ahead,
[00:50:15] Rhys: Lee hearkens back to the new French extremity, you or them?
The whole movie is about a pack of feral 14 year old kids hunting people down. And I’m like, maybe this is another
[00:50:29] Stephen: nod. Yeah. I would say, that’s that’s the thing. These young kids are learning. This they’re anonymous. They can do whatever they want because it’s on the internet and they don’t have to be, they can be themselves.
You can say, I thought the same thing as terrifying as that is. Yeah. But the internet and the social media brings that out. Like the worst of people, we, that’s not the first time we’ve brought that up. Yeah. The
[00:50:54] Rhys: anonymity of it all. And the safety of being in your own house she does manage to get outside.
She’s in the middle of the desert somewhere. And of course, guys come running because she’s
[00:51:03] Stephen: outside. Now, when those sirens went off, did you think we were about to go to the underworld and silent hill? That sound, it
[00:51:11] Rhys: was the sound, but I knew it wasn’t going to be that
[00:51:14] Stephen: good. That really would have changed the movie.
[00:51:16] Rhys: She manages to get ahold of one of their cars and as she’s driving away she gets hit by another vehicle. Yeah. So the defensive driving course would have helped her up. Yeah.
[00:51:27] Stephen: She didn’t really have a lot of where to go. It was a dirt road and through Hills in
[00:51:33] Rhys: the middle of California or something
[00:51:34] Stephen: like that.
And they went, they were in a definite remote location. Yes.
[00:51:38] Rhys: It cuts back to the British lady that she had talked to logging into the den and she’s scrolling through. And she comes across this video of Liz, strung up on a bucket and the bucket gets cucked out and she’s choking for a while and then they cut the line and then just some guy comes over and pretty unceremoniously shoots her in the head.
Then the film freezes there and it has stats. It says Elizabeth died on March on May 7th at 11:49 AM. Eastern standard time. Do you want to take on another person’s narrative and. This is where it starts to do the social commentary thing, because it turns out there’s some guy in his living room or in his office who is like going through and basically ordering up for a minimal fee people to be tortured that he can watch the footage of.
[00:52:44] Stephen: And one of them happens to be that English lady. Yes.
[00:52:49] Rhys: The English lady is
[00:52:50] Stephen: fixed. When you see somebody, you become the next one.
[00:52:54] Rhys: And the door opens and you hear this girl say dad, and he like quickly turning off his laptop. Cause it’s almost like it’s porn. And then the credits roll.
There’s two very interesting things that happened there at the end that make me think the movie might have been a little more influential. Then the release would make you think? There was an Italian movie that just recently came out. It was on Netflix for a hot second. And ah, I can’t remember what it was called, but it was basically this girl.
On a share ride, a ride share thing ends up in this thing and she’s being tortured and there’s all these demons and cult-like stuff. And here it was just somebody filming a movie. Okay. And at the very end of that, is she survives and gets up and walks away. It scrolls out. And there’s some guy actually scrolling through and he’s like ordering stuff up.
And I was like, that’s really crazy. Cause it hearkens back to this movie from 2013, this very low budget, rarely seen kind of thing from 2013. I just thought, you know what, maybe this movie it showed up on a couple of other things they harken back to. I don’t want to say they harken back to cause I don’t know what they were thinking, but it does feel like they harken back to some older movies all in all.
I thought the movie was pretty decent.
[00:54:19] Stephen: Yeah. If, again, if you liked the found footage, if you liked the internet found footage. Movies. Yeah. It’s short, so you’re not spending a lot of time and then going, wow. I wasted my life. It’s it did if it was came out today, it probably wouldn’t be as good.
But considering when it came out before a lot of these other movies started coming out, it was original hit
[00:54:43] Rhys: a sweet spot there. Yeah. It’s yeah, it was a visit to a website. It was an American made film. I thought it fit all the criteria you had not seen it. Nope. Yep. And yeah, that was
[00:54:55] Stephen: the den. So go see that, then get that one. I don’t remember where we got it. I’ll look and find links. There you go. So what’s
[00:55:03] Rhys: Next we’re going to go in the complete opposite direction back to I believe 1929.
And we’re going to watch a silent film called the Phantom carriage.
[00:55:12] Stephen: Yeah, I’m always up for a good black and white silent film. All I need is to get some organ music.
[00:55:17] Rhys: The music in there is I really, I gotta research this because the music on the copy that we have to watch is really eerie and creepy.
And it’s more so more than like the film itself. And if it was actually, if it’s an actual transcription of the music that they played, it was super cutting edge for 1929.
[00:55:39] Stephen: Wow. Yeah, the only place I found this one was archive.org. So
[00:55:46] Rhys: yeah, it’s. Yeah again, you always get me into it. We’ll talk about it
[00:55:53] Stephen: later.
So Phantom carriage net coming up next season two. That’ll be episode four. I do believe. Yeah. All right. Cool. All right. See ya.
