iMurders

In iMurders you get to see Billy Dee Williams gleefully read aloud BBMs. You also get to witness the thrill of hearing someone explain what they can do with a Blackberry (read emails! check stock quotes!). As a companion to this review, check out our iMurders Blubrry podcast discussion, Social Media and Horror Movies.

Rather than a satirical examination of the impact new media (not even new but already obsolescent during filming, 2008) has had on our psyches, we get a dull police procedural jerry-rigged around digital extensions of ourselves. Criminal Minds, Law & Order: SVU and 20/20 beat iMurders to the punch by several years so that presumably every housewife in America knew about the sinister evils lurking about online before this stinker got around to it. Called “a must own” by Horrorsociety.com, this is more of a disown.

As Keats remarked about the last piece of disruptive technology, the car — it gave the average American the opportunity “to make himself more and more common.”

Slumming would-be university dean William Forsythe (The Devil’s Rejects/Dick Tracy) is Dr. Uberoth, a ridiculously ponytailed Liberal Arts professor, garrulous cad and Hemingway buff who is obsessed with chat room banalities. Every night he trades in his wife’s companionship for a site, Facespace (a hopelessly lame portmanteau cashing in on the Myspace and Facebook phenomena) to exchange bon mots with perfect strangers who are perfectly dull.

There are other obsessives too, Del Gado (Billy Dee Williams) a litigator and perky/cute Sandra, a harried corporate event planner.

There you have it: three highly successful, very busy people who talk for a living, talking obsessively in their free time as well, getting lost in a chat room rabbit hole (Ironically Sandra’s new beau, a retired shut-in of all people, doesn’t even own a computer!)

She teachers her nosy landlord/superintendent (an Edie Falco lookalike — this is set mostly in New Jersey after all) the underground wonders of cyberspace, while two preternaturally good-looking women spend countless hours online yakking with the lecherous lawyer and ponderous prof (one of whom, Janet, sees therapist Dr. St. Martin, played by Charles Durning. Why, oh why?)

All the while, members of the chat room are being systematically butchered while the last ones remaining, receive threatening IMs.

“Everyone is a suspect…until they get murdered.”

Not particularly, as the denouement is fairly obvious.

Hammy, horrible, cheap and cynical.

*1/2 (out of 5)