Those who hear the three bells toll accept his invitation
when you hear the first you must close your eyes keeping words unspoken
if one wants to hear you must listen closely, for they are soft and distant
with eyes still closed and mind wide open
clear your thoughts and await the second
opening your eyes only once you've heard the third
Get ready because 4 very impressionable teenage girls stop crushing on hunky college lads for a night and instead summon something awful (see what I did there?).
I've been looking forward to watching this for over a week now, I setup access to Netflix on my laptop but then went away on holiday for a bit and I had my mind made up that this was the film I was going to cover when I got back. I got into the Slenderman (note the absence of the space please) mythos way way back in the halcyon days of 2009 thanks largely to Marble Hornets and as soon as you have finished reading this review you should definitely check out the first video. I followed the Something Awful thread and the Wikia and I've watched all of Marble Hornets, I was fascinated with the idea and the potential it had and apparently I wasn't the only one. Because apparently so was Messrs David Birke and Sylvain White because they went ahead a made a whole movie about it and it did not fail to disappoint.
They literally had everything on a plate for them. Literally. Creepy, unsettling monster, compatibility with today's technological driven society, harrowing, mysterious modus operandi. They had the ball right square where they wanted it as they drove their bat towards and they missed. And not just by a fraction, but by like, a whole bats width or something.
The story focuses on 4 college girls accidentally summoning Slenderman and then *spoilers* he slowly picks them off one by one. There isn't really much else I can flesh that out with. That's the whole movie. They borrow ALOT from the Something Awful content. We see Slendy in the trees, Slendy come out of the woods looking all octopus-sy, Slendy in the corner of the room, Slendy melting through the gap under the doors. It even borrows from Marble Hornets, albeit really badly, with music being distorted when he is near by or him disrupting technology. And do you know what? I am fine with that. I really am. Because that's what makes Slendy Slendy. But it just, falls flat.
The special effects probably don't help. The weird, hallucination scenes and the hysteria episodes the girls go through just were too unrealistic and far fetched. They should have been reflective of a mental breakdown, instead they were just overproduced, or cheap pops for jumps and freak outs and it just looked childish and stupid. Slendy didn't even look that good either, looked like his head was made of clay. Poorly moulded clay.
The acting was really not very good, with the exceptions being Joey King (Wren) and Annalise Basso (Katie, Hallies Sister) who were both pretty good, the others just came across really wooden, and like, acting by numbers. And the stupid scratching, or branch snapping noise, that announced the arrival of Slendy in every scene was just silly. Again, it destroyed any atmosphere, any feeling of suspense.
I feel like you could have really gone somewhere with this. Have the 4 girls descend into paranoia and fear induced mental breakdowns, but more subtly. Not full on wall warping and face warping bollocks. Have Slenderman there but extremely subtly, like Marble Hornets; have the viewer looking for him all the time, have him creep into shot before switching angle (which this film did at first but then was just like ah fuck it), have him flash on to the screen for the briefest of moments like under a streetlamp or something. It could all have been done so much better. But ultimately it wasn't. It was just one big disappointing mess of lost potential. 1 out of 5.
