REVIEW: Streamer (2023)
Do you need yet another reason to hate influencers? If so, this Korean movie will give you more ammunition!
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Back in 2017, a movie from Thailand called Net I Die was released. It was about an influencer who kills herself on live stream after being sponsored by a cosmetics start-up. That movie was worse than bad, but at least it had some excuses. It was the first movie of its kind - where influencers are the main characters - and it didn’t really understand that we, the audience, don’t like influencers. We don’t care about them. And quite frankly, if they die, we’re all better off.
Six years later, Korea never received the memo. Because they decided that this pile of shit - a movie that combines the worst people in the world with the worst horror format in the world - was worthy enough for a release.
And you wonder why I think Korean horror has gone to the dogs lately.
PLOT
Five of the worst humans in the world - of who the movie loosely describes streamers and influencers - gather out front of a location where another streamer supposedly saw a ghost and went missing.
Thinking it’s a prank, the leader of the group leads this motley crew, which includes a spiritual believer, a dumb girl known for her costume changes, another girl who always threatens to get nude on stream and a third guy who is so useless no one really knows what he is doing there, into the location to live stream their “investigation”.
These five annoying clowns head into the building and start randomly screaming at both themselves and things that occur in the background that are supposed to be scary, as they start to somehow put the piece of the mystery together and work out both the history of the location they are in and the whereabouts of the missing streamer.
Whether you make it all the way to the end to discover these answers with them will be dependent on your tolerance level of utter stupidity.
TALKING POINTS
If the whole movie is set in the current time - using mobile phones as cameras - then why are there analogue style VHS glitches in the picture along with the usual digital style pixelation and the annoying pauses in the video used to emulate network buffering? Who was the idiot who decided to mix the two glitching styles together and thinking it was a great idea and no one would notice.
And I can explain why they are using better than the movie can - because the ghost that haunts everyone is from 1988 - the height of VHS. The problem with that is there is no reference to VHS in the film at all, so why use that glitching style?
Five of them are supposed to be live-streaming at the same time. That means they are streaming to their own separate channels instead of one of centralised channel that is editing the footage ala Gonjiam Haunted Asylum. This then adds a level of confusion and annoying as both aspect ratio changes, video quality changes and then as the audience I lose the point of the film - whose stream are we supposed to be following? Why is there no central character to base the stream on? And am I expected to believe that someone has taken the five individual streams and used them, found footage style, to create a narrative about the events of that evening featuring those characters? That’s just stupid and I don’t buy it for second.
Every. Single. Character. Including the ghost and the police man, are annoying. There is no one here to connect with and no one for the audience to cheer for. They’re all loathsome - from the idiotic girl who thinks the first Olympics were hosted in Seoul in 1988, to the other girl who randomly changes emotions during sentence, to the weak idiot who appears to be scared of his own shadow. You will be anxiously awaiting the second half when the cast culling begins.
The ghost - and by extension all the other scary scenes - would have actually been exciting IF the idiots didn’t scream at each other every five seconds. I understand the bat scene was a nice red herring, but every other scene of screaming makes no sense. Thus, the audience gets scream fatigue. We are so sick to death of hearing them screaming at nothing that when something legitimately creepy happens on the screen - such as when the ghost comes out of the room into the hallway or the little kids in the incinerator room - it has zero effect on the audience.
This movie would have benefitted from picking one style rather than going for several. A found footage movie about live streamers investigating a haunted location. Two of those three would been enough, I would have ditched the live-streaming element and written better, more likeable and relatable characters for the audience to connect with.
I don’t understand the constant need for everyone to be bickering in the film. I realise I am having an “old man yells at the clouds” moment, but honestly there are no redeeming qualities in this film at all. And the things that should be kind of impressive such as the ghost make-up, or even the actual story, are lost due to all the other mess around this film.
What are my overall thoughts?
I hate this film, and now I am starting to hate Korean horror films. This is a pile of shit. If you enjoyed this film, please visit a doctor immediately.
0.5 stars out of 5.
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Genre Horror
Director Jang Hyung-mo
Starring Lee Pu-reum, Kwon Min-hyuk, Kim Jun-hyung
Original Title 스트리머
Country of Origin Korea
Release Date May 10 2023