Review #328: Antisocial (2013)
October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #1 - Antisocial (2013)
I wanted to try and have my reviews this year go in chronological order of the holidays they are about; I had been hoping that one or more of these New Year's movies would at least partially deal with New Year's Day, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the case. Well, we're starting this month of horror off with New Year's Eve I guess, because that's when Antisocial takes place.
Unfortunately I'm finding it difficult to talk about this movie without giving away the main idea behind the plot, which really seems like it's meant to be a secret for most of the movie (though I haven't looked into how it was marketed, and I really feel like it would have been difficult to market this as anything except a generic zombie movie without spoiling this main idea). So, fair warning, I'm going to be giving away a plot point that's revealed like 2/3 of the way through.
Antisocial follows Sam, a college girl who has just separated from her (possibly unfaithful) boyfriend and deleted her account on the totally-not-Facebook app "Social Redroom". She then goes out to a New Year's Eve party at a friend's house, only for an emergency broadcast to urge everyone to stay indoors because of a rash of sudden acts of violence and murder across the globe. These acts of violence turn out to be zombie-related, and one of the zombies gets into the house and bingo bango bongo, the virus starts spreading from person to person in the friend group as they each become murderous and get killed. But... what's this? The virus is spread not by bodily fluids or contact, but by.... SOCIAL MEDIA!?
Essentially this movie is "What if Facebook turned people into zombies, no I mean literally turned people into zombies". While I do genuinely think this was an interesting direction to take the film, it comes in so late in the movie (and before that, very little actually happens in this story) that it feels like more of a misguided metaphor than the actual driving force of the movie. (Compare this to something like Pontypool, which also had a non-standard and metaphorical take on a zombie infection, but in that it's established fairly early and explored for most of its runtime.) As I said before, this just felt like a low-budget, generic zombie movie before that reveal (we don't even get big hordes of zombies, I think at any given moment the most we ever seen on-screen is like two or three zombies) so through the middle of this film I really felt like this movie had very little to offer. The ending (no further spoilers) seemed like it could make for an interesting sequel- and apparently there WAS a sequel in 2015, though its description doesn't make it sound very good- but again, the majority of this film was nothing special.
Also, one thing I do need to complain about: there's a subplot in here that goes absolutely nowhere. At the start of the movie when Sam gets jilted by her boyfriend and is talking to him over Social Redroom, it really seems like she has something important to talk to him about (which he interprets as her wanting to break up, so he happily breaks up with her first) and then in the following scene she leaves her class early to throw up (aka, the universal Hollywood sign that she's pregnant). Would you believe that this pregnancy only gets mentioned one time in the entire movie, about halfway through? After another bout of nausea here's a brief moment where one of her friends suspects Sam might be infected with the zombie virus (though they know the symptoms by that point and they don't include vomiting) so she reveals that she's pregnant to assuage their suspicion, but that's literally the first and last time anyone ever brings it up.
I kind of have to ask, why WASN'T vomiting one of the symptoms? Why not weave this subplot into the actual plot by giving all of the other characters good reason to suspect she's infected? Instead, it amounts to one mention, two scenes where she goes to vomit, and one bit of unspoken tension, and that's IT. It could have been cut from the entire film and literally nothing else would have changed. (Apparently the sequel takes place after there's been a time jump, and her now-born baby has been taken from her, so it doesn't even sound like the baby is present in the sequel. I don't know if this is a remnant of an earlier version of the script or what, but whatever the case, it wasn't handled well.)
Overall this film is pretty lackluster, with a few genuinely interesting ideas but a whole lot of missed potential. I could be persuaded to watch this one again someday but I won't be seeking it out.
Overall Rating: 6/10 Christmas Light Bindings
Go Watch Something Better: This movie was the film debut of Michelle Mylett (who played the main character, Sam). Michelle is much more well-known for being one of the primary characters on the Canadian sitcom Letterkenny, which is very good!
Comments
Post a Comment