Movie Review: Chain Letter

Chain Letter starts out extremely promising, but when I find myself not wanting to spoil the OPENING, that's when I know something went terribly wrong along the way. This story takes the old chain letter urban legend and gives it a nasty twist. If you don't pass the email chain letter to five others, you'll die within 24 hours. If you delete the chain letter, you die almost instantly! To boot, you got killed by some guy with a burned face using CHAINS, get it? Chain letter? Ugh!

Now, there are some pretty cool kill scenes in this movie, but this is one of those times when there's a ton of promise that gets wasted. This could have been a really good slasher film. Instead, we get a convoluted story, a group of 35-year old "teens" (none of which you really wind up liking), a ton of techno-terrorism theories and way too little of Brad Douriff. I mean, you have Brad Douriff in your movie, man, USE HIM, he's awesome!! I wonder who's brilliant idea it was to have the computer say "You've got chain letter email!"? Like the computer knows the difference between chain letters and regular email!

On a more positive note, I really liked the way the film was shot. The camera work and cinematography were pretty impressive and the look and sound design of the movie are well represented on blu ray. It's one of the more sparse blu ray discs I've ever seen as all it contains is the movie and the trailer, no special features to be found anywhere.

Like I said, this movie started out with a bang. The opening scene was expertly shot and really set a stage for the movie that it ultimately failed to live up to. At the end of the day, not much was revealed, too many questions were left unanswered and it wasn't good enough for me to care about finding out the answers should Chain Letter 2: The Missing Link (made up title) be made.

Chain Letter gets *1/2 out of *****. The one and a half stars go to Brad Douriff because he's AWESOME!!

Check out the trailer for Chain Letter below