DEADCON

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I don't get YouTube. I mean, it's useful for listening to music or watching video clips and the like: trailers, old pop songs, bits of TV shows, hilarious commercials from thirty years ago and so on. But to make a career from it, to make a fortune out of it: that just seems too weird for me. I don't get how anyone can get thousands, even millions of people to follow your opinions, theories and philosophies, let alone your thoughts on the first teaser images from the new Star Wars movie or whether the Earth is actually flat. And I don't get how anyone can make enough money from this to make it worth the effort. Yet some people seem to be doing very nicely out of it.

Not that I'm jealous or anything, but if this film is anything to go by, then the people who seem to be doing very nicely out of social media would also seem to be doing very nicely out of it while contributing absolutely nothing back to it, or the world in general. Set against a convention of YouTubers and online "personalities" whose stock in trade is pointless lifestyle blether (Look at these cool boots I got! Look at this cool hotel suite I've got! I'm going to a really cool party tonight!) Deadcon takes a handful of these pretty young content-free content generators and shoves them into a haunted hotel suite in which something very bad happened back in 1984, and the room has been sealed ever since...

The result of their empty-headed, insight-free insignificance is that I just don't care about them: they're just a bunch of whiny pretty people typical of a thousand other C-list horror movies and it's as impossible to be interested in their supernatural terrors as their personal problems and sexual antics. All you've got left is the mechanics of the movie itself but that's not very interesting either: one minor frisson involving a bedsheet apart, it's all mysterious appearances on video screens, lights going out, doors opening themselves, a creepy looking balloon and mysterious symbols on the walls. And it ends, as I hoped it wouldn't, with five minutes of incoherent phonecam found footage which frankly put the tin hat on an already unexciting and uninteresting movie that's not even as good as the not-good 1408.

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