Day 678

Aka Sunday 9^th December 2018

Today my nephew and I went to the park to do a bit more kite flying, but we got a little caught out by the rain. When we left the house, it was just about spitting, but in the ten minutes it took to get to the park and start kite flying it had gone form spitting to solidly raining. So, we waited under a bus shelter for five minutes to see if it would let up, but it didn’t, so we started for home, except after a minute or so the rain stopped, so we headed back and did get to do some kite flying. And after that my nephew played in the playground for a little bit and then we went home and after yesterday’s success my nephew asked for another ham and cheese omelette for lunch.

…watched ‘Friend Request’ and ‘Sinister’ on NetFlixs:

‘Friend Request’ is about an American young woman, Laura played by Alycia Debnam-Carey, studying at college who has loads of friends in real life and online. There is a girl, Marina Mills played by Liesl Ahlers, in one of Laura’s classes who is an outsider, Laura notices her and becomes her friend and her only Facebook friend. Marina becomes very attached to Laura, verging on being a stalker, this leads to Laura un-friending Marina irl and on Facebook, this drives Marina to kill herself. Following the suicide things go really wrong for Laura and see loses her online friends and her irl friends are being killed/start dying.  

There isn’t anything new about the plot (person gets cursed, loses the best bits of their life and their friends and is driven to almost madness), but ‘Friend Request’ does a good, competent job with it, it’s nicely filmed and acted, there are plenty of scares and the tension builds nicely throughout the film. It’s a small thing but the film really gets over the frustration of (a) trying to do something on your computer and the computer not doing it and just displaying an error box and (b) not being believed by your friends and others (I won’t explain more so as not to spoil anything). 7/10.

‘Sinister’ is about a real-life crime writer, Ellison Oswalt played by Ethan Hawke, who with his family, moves into a house in which the previous family were murdered, except for the youngest child who was abducted. In the loft he finds an odd box containing a film projector and several cans of home movies, with each film showing a family being killed. As Ellison investigates the films, strange things happen in the house, Ellison seems to be losing grip on reality and things end on a nasty note.

Like ‘Friend Request’ ‘Sinister’ has a pretty familiar plot, family move to a new house, which causes familial tensions and arguments to come to the surface and makes one of the family members go murderous (or appear to be murderous). But it adds a nice twist with the home movies and the story behind/reason for the events of the film, is well shot, some good jump scares (and one jump scare you can see coming from a mile away) and it nicely builds the tension and feeling of dread building to the films climax. 7/10.