31 Nights of Halloween Horror part 13 - Don't Hang Up

Don’t Hang Up

83 mins

Dir. Damien Mace & Alexis Wajsbrot

2016/USA

Don’t hang up?  How about don’t even bother answering the phone and change the channel.  Nothing to in-depth here, a couple of rich white suburban assholes make prank phone calls, film them and post it on youtube and become minor celebrities with all their hits.  Till one day they prank the wrong person and said person gets revenge and then some.  The biggest problem with this movie is the two main characters are total assholes, they are assholes to everyone else and they are assholes to each other.  So when a killer targets them for his own deadly pranks, you could care less if they live or die, in fact you hope they die because they deserve it for all the bullying and grief they caused other people.

A little mix of Saw with the killer turning the tables on the pranksters and somehow being able to control one of the kids house lights, TV, computer, pretty much anything that is electric.  I was waiting for the toaster to pop some toast and the blender to turn on on its own at one point.  Maybe the killer is an electronic wiz computer hacker, who knows, that part is never explained.  A little mix of Scream, teenagers trapped in a house panicking, whatever, who cares.  Not much tension going on, but the cinematography is not too bad nor direction from this pair of first timers.  Acting is fine, unless these kids are really assholes and they are not acting but playing themselves.

Luckily the film is short and quickly paced so it doesn’t bore you too much, however it is highly predictable and like I said the kids are assholes, so why should you route for them or care what happens to them?  The moral of this movie is, don’t be a dick.  Plain and simple, don’t be a dick to other people, just be cool with people and you won’t wind up with a knife sticking in your gut or a bullet in your head, or your throat slashed or a bag over your head and suffocated.  Seems like pretty simple rules to live by to me.

I guess you can add this one into another one of the Don’t movies, like Don’t Open the Window, Don’t Go in the Woods, Don’t Go in the Basement, Don’t Look Now, Don’t be Afraid of the Dark, Don’t Go Near the Park, Don’t Answer the Phone, Don’t Open Until Christmas, Don’t Breathe, christ, that is a lot of things you shouldn’t do.  To sum it up, just don’t watch Don’t Hang Up.  And if you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you.  You don’t want to waste your time unless you don’t want to listen to me.  I don’t have anything else to say.

I bet you thought I was going to review a Friday the 13th movie, because that is today's date.  But that would be as lame and predictable as those movies are.  This is all about discovering something new and sometimes you have to take the good with the bad.