Movie Review: Selfie From Hell (2018)

When pro-vlogger Julia (Meelah Adams) arrives in the states from Germany to visit her cousin Hannah (Alyson Walker) she brings a few things along for the trip…like the ability to cry sideways, and a strange shadowy figure that haunts her selfies, oh, and let’s not forget the ability to send text messages without using her god damned phone because she’s seemingly possessed, and also some sort of infection (that one is reasonable at least)…seriously; I’d ask this bitch to leave about 2 millifarts (it’s a real measurement…and it’s mega short believe me…I’m a reviewer, I know things…) after she walked across my threshold. Anyway, Hannah is a better person than your’s cruelly and instead plays nursemaid to her sickly/haunted cuz…while also launching into a full on Nancy Drew to search all of the deep (web), dark (net) online secrets Julia is keeping…mainly that she got involved in some seriously F’d up crap on a part of the internet none should travel…and of course Hannah gets mixed up in the same nightmare right quick!
If you can get past the title, Selfie From Hell is a fun lil’ supernatural shocker replete with surely soon to be dated internet lingo (and when I say “dated” that’s not a minus…think of the extra layer of enjoyment you now have with films such as Strangeland because of the web speak of the day), a cool mythology, an engaging relatively tension filled mystery to be solved, and to it’s credit…a shocker of an ending (given how these things usually end up). With all that comes some good performances as well, especially from Walker who transitions nicely from normal woman who enjoys tea and a good book, to a person on a mission that won’t let something like common sense get in her way of tumbling headlong into the horror biz, and Tony Giroux as her tech-savvy pal Trevor, who comes across as a likable bloke…so you know, you actually care about what happens to him.
On the downside, if you are one of those folks that can’t stand jump scares you may want to avoid this flick as those pesky J.S.’s come about the same frequency as toilet paper shortages in a diarrhea contest (those are things, right?), which is to say every other damn second! I personally don’t mind the jump scares…yeah, they are cheap, but getting folks to jump out of their skins in any manner possible has been a staple of our beloved genre since day one…so their overuse here didn’t bother me as much as my next quibble. For the love of hell, the monster in this film is one of the most uninspired designs I have ever seen…he’s a bald, withered, eyeless thing that moves with the ol’ herky-jerk…trust me, you have seen this dude countless times before…with a rather unique story and world building you’d think the film makers would have pulled it out in the clutch and delivered a truly unique beast, but sadly that was not the case.
All things considered (and even with that boring as balls monster), Selfie From Hell was an enjoyable fright flick fracas. Would I revisit it over and over? Probably not (though I bet in about 10 years this thing will be fried gold)…but I enjoyed my time with the film, and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone that wants to watch a lightweight supernatural romp while munching popcorn and having a beer or two.