When The Horror Guide’s Mike Mayo was on our podcast, he predicted the next big thing would be new media, and boy are the horror genre’s servers overloaded. Unfriended, Dot.Kill, Friend Request, DeathTube, iMurders* and here, Cam2Cam…
It’s enough to make you unplug and retreat to your cabin in the woods (if there weren’t killers lurking about there and dammit, where’s decent cell service when you need it?)
Cam2Cam (2014) is marginally different in that it’s set in glorious Bangkok, a place authors of this site know and love, a raucous city that never sleeps that makes New York City look positively sedate. Bars never close and you can get a full meal cooked for you on the street by an old grandma in a smock, day or night.
In the Thai capital, a creepy Brit who wears checker-board wool sweaters in the perpetually 30-degree city chats up women online, then murders them.
An American brunette, Allie, wandering around Khao San Road, ground zero for sarong-wearing patchouli trust-funders, meets up with devil-may-care French woman Marit. They are staying at a derelict hostel where the drained pool has become a gross beer cap repository. But more importantly for the purposes of a horror, there’s a room that’s got a lot of bad mojo on account of a girl being murdered there.
Sexy Marit introduces Allie to the sordid world of Cam2Cam, a website pretty much what you think it is, where la seductrice plays the violin naked (hey, if Paganini sold his soul to the devil…).
Shocked college girl Allie apparently has to go to another hemisphere to encounter sites like this, which is pretty hard to believe, but anyway…
Suffice it to say, a lot of westerners go to Southeast Asia to find themselves, and the American lass finds herself in a whole wack of trouble after her French friend is found brutally murdered.
Tammin Sursock (Pretty Little Liars) is capable in the lead as the naive Allie, and it’s always great seeing the Land of Smiles, Thailand, as a filming locale.
People who isolate themselves in darkness obsessing over the unreal world of the online world is great fodder for horror. Unfortunately, although it hits a few voyeuristic high notes and is exploitative enough to match the subject matter, Cam2Cam comes up a bit short in terms of frights/gore.
**1/2 (out of 5)
[*Hear our chat about social media and horror and iMurders, on Episode 48b of the Really Awful Movies Podcast]
Really Awful Movies 