Chain Letter Review

• 13th Apr 2011

Chain Letter is a by-the-numbers teen slasher flick that centres on a violent killer who likes to send unsuspecting teens death threats via an internet chain letter. The opening of the film is superb as we witness the possible demise of a young pyjama-clad girl, bound with a combination of duct tape (always menacing) and chains. When an unsuspecting couple leave the house for work they are unwitting executioners as their expensive cars quarter the young victim. Sadly it’s downhill from here, as the action moves to the local high school and the inevitable cast of typical teens: the jock, the nerdy girl (throw some glasses on a Maxim hottie), the token black guy, the computer geek, the hot slut, the ‘outsider’ (grease in the hair, denim jacket)… turn up one after another.  When the chain letter is received by geek boy the forwarding (or deleting) occurs and we the audience can then happily sit back and wait for the inevitable killings to follow.

Chain Letter strives for a modern subtext with overtures to tech fears and tortured war veterans. Ultimately, this is lost amid the terrible script and disastrously predictable narrative that any fan of the genre has seen a million times already. The performances by the young cast are all awful which sadly seems to have rubbed off on cult greats Brad Dourif (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) and Keith David (The Thing) who are also dreadful.  David seems to have wandered onto the set from a casting call for the Morgan Freeman part in Se7en… 17 years too late.  Dourif on the other hand is a sleazy technophobe teacher who holds lectures about the evils of mobile phones and the internet with a slide show that seemingly has nothing to do with anything.

The film has an amazing twelve producers credited who should all feel roundly ashamed for allowing such tripe as this to see the light of day. At the very least, the lack of a coherent narrative and a decent script should have resulted in the violence being amped up to mask the film’s limitations. Sadly the makers failed, even in this respect, as the death scenes are workmanlike at best. It’s a case of “so how was the gore?” “Terrible and not enough of it!” Genre staples such as the Saw franchise have taken the violent death scene to a new stratosphere of brutality. Chain Letter is tame by comparison providing another nail in its already very full coffin. The need to stick with the chain theme is sadly limiting to say the least as there is only so much you can do with one killing implement.

Another appalling aspect of this film, and the genre as a whole, is the amazing lack of nudity in it. The early slasher films – think classics like Slumber Party Massacre and Halloween – were basically nothing but tits and blood. And then some more blood. Sadly, the post-Scream need for glossy teens and a fear of controversy has driven the genre into a cul-de-sac of non-ending mediocrity.

Cobbling together ideas from The Ring, Final Destination and Saw does not make for a happy marriage – at least not in the case of Chain Letter. Amazingly forgettable in every way, the film doesn’t even have the decency to be so bad it’s good. Advice to future watchers would simply be: move along, there’s nothing to see here.

Aled Jones