Don’t Hang Up Review
Don’t Hang Up tells the tale of a group of pranksters who find the tables turned on them during one dramatic evening. Sam (Gregg Sulkin) and Brady (Garrett Clayton) are two best friends who are part of a network of phone pranksters. They pass their time calling up strangers and inventing all manner of stories to scare their victims on the other end of the line. Of course being of the younger generation, they also film and upload their pranks to their social media channels, and have become cult internet icons.
One night, whilst sensible Sam’s parents are away, Brady turns up with beer and an urge to make some calls. But this is the night that someone, a Mr. Lee, has decided it’s time for the pair to get a taste of their own medicine. The boys find themselves menaced and threatened by Mr. Lee, and then their friends start turning up dead. Can the pair change their ways, or will they go the way of their friends?
Don’t Hang Up Review
Don’t Hang Up is the latest in the recent trend of technology-led horrors. Previous films such as Friend Request and Unfriended have relied on Facebook and Skype to scare teen audiences, and caution about how they use the internet. Here we have the group uploading their videos to a YouTube-like platform, the film highlighting the reach and impact that these videos can have. That being said, unlike Unfriended whose narrative was all online, Don’t Hang Up throws back to the glory days of the good old telephone. A good portion of the first third feels like the opening ten minutes of Scream as Sam and Brady are repeatedly rang by the creepy Mr. Lee. It’s nice to see the humble house phone once again being used for scares, but how many of the target audience will recognise the significance remains to be seen.
The opening third is where the film is strongest, the extended Scream scenario works really well, building a good amount of tension. Sadly though the film starts to veer off into Saw territory, with the boys being made to make live or die level decisions. It’s here that we get a load of the new wave of horror tropes, including the rather frustrating cheating girlfriend. Far too many genre films these days have this unneeded love triangle, here as with so many before it, it adds nothing and rather cheapens things.
Don’t Hang Up Review
The biggest flaw though for Don’t Hang Up, is that our protagonists are fundamentally bullies, making them really hard to connect with. The opening prank involving a call to a woman in the middle of the night pretending to be police and saying that some criminals are inside the house, is deplorable. Even more so when they go so far as to pretend that these intruders have the woman’s young daughter. It’s just not a funny prank, so when later they start being picked off, you can’t help but feel that they’re getting their rightful comeuppance.
An interesting premise that never really gets off of the ground, Don’t Hang Up is a valiant, but ultimately disappointing, addition to the new social media horror genre.
Don’t Hang Up is out on DVD on 12th June 2017 and on digital on 26th June 2017.
