Friends Forever

When you discover an old abandoned house the first thing you should do is make sure that no grizzly murders or supernatural activity took place there. If you discover that nothing has happened then you’re probably in the all clear, but don’t count your chickens because you may become the original grizzly event. If by chance something has happened then run, run as fast as you can. These are the basic rules which anybody who has ever watched a horror film at any point in their life knows to follow. The characters in ‘Friends Forever’ clearly have never watched a horror film and instead label the story ‘gnarly’ and brush it aside. This is perhaps an indicator of how the story is strong in its ideas and concept but lacklustre in execution.

The film opens with the murders that echo throughout the film, instantly letting the audience know its genre with eerie music, that runs throughout the film and becomes rather cheesy and overdone by the time it’s reached its conclusion. A farmer’s corn rots - bringing in the classic fear of being blighted by the devil from both classical and biblical sources - and before you know it a mother (played hauntingly by Julie Carney) is slitting the throats of her husband and children. The murders have no apparent motive, which wouldn’t be an issue necessarily, but it becomes one as the spirits of the dead haunt a new generation.

The titular ‘friends forever’ are Cassandra (Ashlee Lawhorn), Erica (Colleen O’Morrow, who gives the best, most unnerving performance of the film), Ryan (Mark Murtha) and Lisa (Paige Hoover). Its 1987 and they discover the abandoned house of the murders and decide to throw a party that evening for themselves and their friends. As expected, the party goes awry - even more awry than the party in ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge’ that resulted in a bloodbath - and before long there are piles of bodies on the floor, bloody spewing from all of their orifices. The idea of a party being haunted by the spirits of the dead is a good one, and in the more trippy scenes it is effective, however, the execution of the film as a whole means that its true potential is never realised.

The characters never feel properly fleshed out, and so we never have reason to root for them - as is essential for any horror film. There is also the fact that the deaths come too quickly and are too numerous. There is no build of suspense or tension with a minor event to precede the first death, or any sense of horror that the characters experience as the deaths are in the middle of occurring. Additionally, the earlier killings are revealed too early, thus never allowing the characters to discover what is happening, which in the process would endear them to us as the audience more.

This is indicative of the problems in the script, written by Jared Acker, Paige Hoover and Thomas Angeletti. They cut corners in the narrative and do not spend any time building up or creating characters. Angeletti’s directing similarly does a disservice to the story. He fails to imbue the film with any sense of setting - something essential for a haunted house film - whilst too often it feels as though the film lacks weight and gravity. This isn’t helped by the poor sound design, that makes each scene feel as though it is nothing more than just a scene in a film, rather than creating any sort of investment in the story. The score contains all the stereotypical sounds that you would expect in a horror film, and underwhelms in helping to create an eerie atmosphere.

‘Friends Forever’ is a lacklustre execution of a strong concept. It lacks the atmosphere, creativity and characters essential to any good horror film, and instead comes across as merely a cheap imitation.