Sometimes movies are so bad that they’re good. Whether it’s because of a befuddling plot or laughable acting, these films find their strength in their inability to get things right. Unfortunately for us, this is absolutely not the case with director Scooter Corkle’s latest film, The Friendship Game. The movie, which tells the story of four high school friends who end up having their friendship tested after playing a mysterious game meant to reveal the true strength of their bonds with one another, is downright terrible.
While exploring a local yard sale, Cotton Allen (Kaitlyn Santa Juana as a character whose name is the first of many references to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser) discovers a hefty looking metal polyhedron amongst the usual tchotchkes. An older woman approaches her and asks if she “knows who [her] friends are,” explaining that the object is a game in which players must place their fingertips on the surface of the shape and take turns voicing their deepest desires. In doing so, the friendship between the players will be tested, and only the truest of friends will survive the challenge. This scene, which is an obvious rip off of Hellraiser (“What’s your pleasure, Mr. Cotton?”), does not feel like an homage or nod to its original source material but rather an unoriginal copy that sets the tone for what is arguably one of the most confusing 87 minutes in horror movie history.
What makes The Friendship Game so goddamn unwatchable is the fact that its script was seemingly written by someone who had a lot of ideas and no real understanding of how to properly turn them into something coherent. Right from the start, viewers are thrown into the mess of a plot trying to understand just how Cotton and her friends got ahold of the game in the first place (Can we just refer to it as The Lament Configuration, because honestly, that’s what it is). Did they purchase it from the lady at the yard sale or did it just mysteriously show up in Cotton’s room one day? No one knows. In fact, much of the movie is just as unnecessarily confusing that writing a review of it feels almost impossible to do. Scenes jump around in complicated and disjointed ways, and even though there seems to be some underlying message here about the dangers of technology (or the internet? Or cell phones? Or friendship?) and teens, whatever that message is gets lost to the cyberspace from which it came.
When the friends sit down to actually play the game, what follows is one of the least suspenseful scenes to ever play out on screen. There’s no magical shuddering or noise that comes out of the mysterious shape. No strange lights or sounds or quaking of the furniture in the room. Instead, literally nothing happens, and we are flashed forward (or backwards? Who knows? Who cares?) to some rager of a party that all four friends are busy getting crunk at because this is their last summer before college and omg their worlds are about to end fr real, you guyz (It should be noted that Cotton’s biggest desire is to essentially never grow up to become a parent, god forbid). Things only get more confusing from here as Cotton mysteriously disappears leaving the rest of her group to try and figure out what happened to her.
The rest of the movie is full of convoluted and confusing plot lines involving everything from a supremely stupid love square (because a triangle would be too easy) to a weird kid hacker named Kyle (Dylan Schombing) who gets his kicks from hacking into the web cams (because apparently this is 2005 and all of these teens are Peyton Sawyer from One Tree Hill) of high schoolers and watching them do whatever it is that they do (i.e. sex and crying). At some point, the remaining three friends realize the game is granting them their deepest desires (though to those watching this may seem very unclear), and a lot of moody angst and unexplained and misplaced gore follows.
Fans of The Karate Kid spin-off Cobra Kai may find themselves drawn to this mess of a film because of Peyton List who plays Tory Nichols on the aforementioned show. Here, she plays a similar hardened teen named Zooza, and she honestly might be the only good part of this entire movie. She’s spunky and convincing in all the right ways which is remarkable considering what she was given to work with. The remaining two teens, Robbie (Brendan Meyer) and Courtney (Kelcey Mawema), also manage to do quite a lot with very little, though one has to wonder how anyone would be hung up on the character of Robbie when it looks like he goes to the same hairdresser as Will Byers from Stranger Things. But no matter how interesting or convincing the characters can be, The Friendship Game is so unnecessarily complicated that it’s probably better to just skip it and go watch the original Hellraiser instead.
Photo courtesy of RLJE Films
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