As much as I complain about it and act confused, I know why many British movies with limited budgets do their best to mix in a number of accents and keep shooting scenes in a way that make so many locations seem equally anonymous. It's a marketing tactic. A way to sell your product as more than just a "British low-budget horror". Sadly, it almost always gets my hackles up. It makes me feel as if a film has been made more by people who want to increase their sales opportunities than people who have faith in their material. Don't get me wrong, I know that a lot of people want to increase their sales, even if it's just by a small enough margin to let them continue creating more of the art that they want to focus on, but I don't need that to be the main thing overshadowing every other element of a movie.
Much like every other horror movie looking to cash in on current tech fears, Jitters is about deadly AI. Sort of. People are dying, and it all seems to be linked to a game featuring a character called Jitters (Daniel Jordan). It's up to Detective Collymore (Fabrizio Santino) to get to the bottom of things, but he's also busy trying to navigate a post-divorce life with his young daughter (Izzy, played by Chloe Hews).
If you scour the internet looking for general opinions on Jitters then, thanks to real-life AI, you will find a number of word salad pieces that praise various elements and rate the film as a decent techno-horror. Ironically, that's one of the major downsides of AI right now. It has made it harder to find real words written by real people about real things, whether those words are opinions or facts. So for those who manage to get around the algorithm and find their way here, let me be very blunt . . . Jitters is crap.
Only the second feature directed by Marc Zammit, but already a step down from his debut (Witch, featuring a number of the same creative people involved), this feels lazy, careless, and painfully unscary. There's no tension, partly because of the poor plotting and partly because of the underwritten characters giving you nobody worth rooting for. And as for some of the stranger decisions . . . it's not as if every decision needs to be fully explained, but some of them seem to have no good reason for being here, except to potentially benefit those aforementioned sales opportunities.
The cast is a very mixed bag. I'll be nice enough to avoid commenting too much on Santino's lead performance, and I'll be even nicer by remembering to mention that Hews isn't bad as his young daughter. Jordan tries to do well as the dastardly Jitters, but he isn't given a proper direction for his performance. He should be scary or fun, or an unnerving mix of the two, but he's just someone who seems to like the sound of his own voice as he spouts nonsense about the game and the players. Linda-Jean Barry is much better than the film deserves in her role as the exposition-delivering Dr. Harriet Brooks, and everyone else here feels as if they might just be happy enough adding another title to their C.V. (which can then be padded out with AI, and lost in a shuffle of other AI-embellished filmographies)
Jitters wants to join many other films and voices telling you that AI is very scary and dangerous. It undoubtedly is, but mostly because it helps to exponentially increase two of the worst habits that so many opportunists are guilty of: thoughtlessness and laziness.
2/10
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