In the grand scheme of things, as tempted as you might be to label it as such, Share Or Die is far from the worst low-budget horror movie you could watch. It’s not good, but it’s not good in a few ways that will work well for those seeking something to mock. Plus it has two decent death scenes (although I know that some people find one of those scenes far too silly, but I appreciated that it was at least being entertaining and inventive).
The plot is simple. People receive a message on their phones. They then have a minute to share that message with someone or they will die. Not wanting to give anyone else a potential death sentence? No problem. As specified in the text, you can also break the chain, and avoid death, if you instead share a secret that you have never previously told anyone. Which means it COULD be quite easy to avoid death, but the need to keep the characters here in peril means that very few people get their shit together quickly enough in the minute allotted to them.
To be fair, I wouldn’t share some message that said I had a minute to do something or I would suddenly die. I am that person on social media you can rely on to never be one of the people sharing your copied and pasted message of an emotionally manipulative substitute for real character and/or action. So I would be dead, no doubt about it.
Writer-directors Joseph Mazzaferro and Joseph Daniel Thomas sometimes try to do their best with limited resources (one scene featuring mouth trauma really made me wince, my other favourite moment was a fun use of a camera filter), but they also end up padding the slight runtime with far too many tiresome conversations, mistaking boring and meaningless chat with a representation of normality. They should have remembered the famous saying that cinema is life with all of the boring bits removed. This is split almost exactly 50/50 between passable fun, if not always for the right reasons, and stuff that will make viewers yawn.
The cast don’t really help, although I didn’t mind Lauren Crandall as the nominal lead, Becka. Everyone is hampered by the weak script, with the only real standout performances coming from people who somehow manage to covey a sense of fun while they are delivering their awful dialogue (Callie Grayson and Allison Young being the best, I think, due to them calling to mind the two gal pals from Final Destination 3).
There are a number of social media horrors to choose ahead of this, easily. The Unfriended movies, Friend Request, Countdown, even something like Hellphone (2007). Watch any of them ahead of this, but you won’t end up being as tortured as expected if you end up watching this one. Even if it abruptly ends with the most misplaced blooper reel I have ever seen.
3/10
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