Viewed at the Festival de Film, Cannes 2010
If all you want from a horror film are some gory kills and blood, go ahead, knock yourself out and have a ball. But if you want anything more, say a decent script, a story that makes sense, characters, even one, you can root for, some logic, even internal logic, and finally a decent killer with motivation, look elsewhere. Make no mistake Chain Letter is a mess.
So much of this film makes no or very little sense it's hard to know where to start. Basically, teens who receive a chain letter and fail to pass it on get offed. Why they are getting this letter I could never figure out. How the killer manages to do what he does defies even the often screwy logic of such films. At times he seems to be in several places at once, doing different things. It's almost like the producers took every draft script and shuffled them together, pulling out 100 pages at random and saying, "Now let's make this one"!
Even if Chain Letter were good, and it's anything but, it would still not rise above the level of clichéd and derivative: the Japanese do it so much better. Heck! Just about everyone does it better!
I love horror films, I even enjoy ones that are so bad they're good. There's usually something to be found in them. But treat Chain Letter like the real thing: don't pass it on no matter what the promise, just trash it.
