ANTISOCIAL

ANTISOCIAL

It's New Year's Eve. Criminology student Sam (Michelle Mylett) is dumped by her boyfriend Dan (Charlie Hamilton) via an online video conversation.

Aware that she's also flunking in her college subject, her friends invite her round to their dorm for a party that night. Enter nerdish Jed (Adam Christie), nice guy Mark (Cody Ray Thompson), cool dude Steve (Romaine Waite) and his sluttish new girlfriend Kaitlin (Ana Alic).

Their evening is rather innocuous in its infancy: they all convene, discuss the relevance of social media as a means of communication (!) and then divide into two groups: Steve and Kaitlin retire to the bedroom for a fuck (recording it on their Smartphone, naturally) while Sam, Mark and Jed watch the news on TV. The newsreader reports of strange instances in the area whereby students have begun turning demented and killing people...

Jed is the first to pick up on the TV's advice that no-one should go outdoors. And this is cemented further when Sam and co suffer two break-in attempts from rabid versions of people they recognise from college, within minutes of one another. Jed tries to ring the police but gets a recorded message: even they're inundated with instances of such attacks.

Pretty soon, this motley bunch of pals are holed-in in their apartment fending off hordes of brain-dead assailants while frantically searching online for more information appertaining to this mysterious epidemic.

What's worse, those in the apartment start getting paranoid about one another once they learn, via online blogs, what the symptoms of this viral infection are: nosebleeds, hallucinations, aggression and so forth ...

My synopsis for ANTISOCIAL is relatively short because there is very little in the way of exposition. This thing gets to the action very quickly, and the bulk of the remaining action comes on like a post-Millennial take on NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD mixed with the internal paranoia of John Carpenter's THE THING and, latterly, a nod towards VIDEODROME.

Significantly, it's worth giving thought to what VIDEODROME director David Cronenberg would've made of this premise. Tumours, trepanning, an online virus that infects subscribers to a specific site physically: it would have been right up his street. I reckon he'd have made a great film from Chad Archibald and director Cody Calahan's script. As it stands, they do a fair job but they overcook the commentary upon social media.

From the get-go, characters are pre-occupied with discussing the worth of interacting with friends electronically. No bad thing in itself, but it comes across as very contrived. We get the theme, it's quite obvious from the offset - we don't need it shovelling further down our throats for the next 30 minutes.

Anyway. ANTISOCIAL relaxes on this social element somewhat during its second half and does concentrate more on eliciting tension from its siege situation. To its credit, it succeeds. The characters are well-written (they're actually likeable for a change) and the actors all perform well; the techno score works in an absurdly offbeat way. Visually the film is strong, always attractive to look at, and there's a cockiness to proceedings that I can't help but smile at by the time we come to the sequel-inviting final frame...

Monster Pictures bring ANTISOCIAL to UK DVD and blu-ray fully uncut. We were furnished with a copy of the DVD for the purposes of this review.

ANTISOCIAL looks extremely good overall in 16x9 widescreen (1.85:1). Images are crisp, blacks are deep and sturdy, colours are finely balanced. There is a slight watered-down look to events at times, but it's almost certain that this is entirely down to the digital format that the film was shot on. This is even commented upon in the accompanying commentary track by the film's cinematographer.

English audio comes in choices of 2.0 and 5.1 mixes. Both are ample propositions.

The disc opens to an arresting animated main menu page which is set up to look like the home page of a social media site, with a montage of clips from the film in its profile picture square.

From there, a static scene-selection menu allows access to ANTISOCIAL via 8 chapters.

Bonus features commence with a 94-second trailer which claims to have played theatrically, though I'd never heard of the film before. Still, this is fast-paced and works from a marketing perspective as it makes the film look more tantalising than it is.

A behind-the-scenes featurette runs for 16 minutes and is a slickly compiled mixture of EPK-style interviews with the cast (in bloodied make-up) and crew, alongside on-set footage. There's too little of the latter, but otherwise this is a valid addition to this set.

Most substantial of all though, we get an audio commentary track from Calahan and director of photography Jeff Maher. They offer a good blend of technical information - the sequence in which shots were completed, designing sets, the significance of lighting and composition etc - and their own opinions on social networking as a cultural phenomenon, horror cinema's history of shying away from using technology as a source of terror, and so on. It's a good, honest commentary track that highlights flaws as well as aspects they're most proud of. If there's a flaw, it's that the film's main audio track hasn't been diluted any - so sometimes it's difficult to hear these two speak.

We also get trailers for a few other titles in the Monster Pictures roster: ALL SUPERHEROES MUST DIE, FALLOW FIELD, MUIRHOUSE and MIDNIGHT SON.

ANTISOCIAL is a small film, but looks fabulous thanks to largely being shot on the RED camera. It has good characters and a timely premise, albeit one that is drummed to death in one respect. But there is still tension, minor gore and a few surprises for viewers to enjoy - and the film comes recommended as a result.

Monster Pictures' DVD is an excellent showcase for the film too.

By Stuart Willis


 
Released by Monster Pictures
Region 2
Rated 18
Extras :
see main review
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