The Horror Show
Ratter
by Branden Kramer
Ratter is the 2016 flop that landed in my lap sometime last week. Okay, more like it was recommended to me and I wish that it never had been. There’s a new genre of what I like to call “real time footage” because I don’t know that it can be considered found footage. For example, 2015’s Unfriended even boasts that it is a “new genre of horror.” What genre is that? Crappy? Sorry, couldn’t help myself, but really, I’d rather watch an hour of someone running through the woods screaming with a shaky camera than watch them play a tennis video game for ten minutes in the comfort of their own home.
In Ratter, we get to see things through the camera lens of main character Emma’s phone, laptop, xbox, etc… you get the gist. Someone, and unfortunately we don’t ever find out the how, why, or who, has hacked all of poor Emma’s devices and watches her every waking (and sometimes sleeping) moment. This hacker has an unnatural obsession with a beautiful yet boring college student who lives alone in New York City and likes to shave her legs multiple times a day. At least that’s what I got out of the movie. If you got something more, please, let me know.
The trailer looked interesting enough, and when I looked up more information on the film, I found that it was based on the 2012 German viral video Webcam. I didn’t want to spoil anything before watching Ratter so I chose not to watch the short film first. Unfortunately though, now that I’ve seen a full length film based on the short, I have no desire to watch the original video. Aside from the creep factor, the movie offered me nothing else aside from a peek into what the director/writer thought was the daily life of the American college student. But what we got was 85% boring, 10% interesting, and 5% scary. And I use the scary word loosely. Like I said, the creep factor is there, there are two scenes in particular that I was like “nope” but overall this film just doesn’t do it for me.
A couple red herrings are strewn about to try and keep things interesting, but really any average movie watcher would be smart enough to know better. Or at least I would hope they’d know better. I think if we had been given some sort of inkling as to how this hacker/stalker came to know about Emma or even the why behind his obsession it would have made more sense and the threat level would have been higher in some way. Here’s a thought: her parents are obviously paying for everything for her, hence the giant sized apartment in friggin’ New York City. Perhaps the hacker/stalker man hates pampered college kids or maybe she turned her nose up at him in a coffee shop. I don’t know, but we were given nothing and supposed to care about characters with barely any development; it pissed me off.
Overall the film falls flat for me. I didn’t hate it, but I feel like I spent more time wondering when the movie would get to the point than I did caring about Emma or anything else in the film. On the plus side though, Orange is The New Black star Matt McGorry is in it and he’s always fun to look at. But I wouldn’t watch for that, you can just go to Netflix and watch the show if you want to see him.
Stevie Kopas, HMS
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