Death Link – Film Review

A link to a video reaches high school senior Julie (Elise Luthman) through her preferred social networking app, Instatock. In it, her friend Albert appears to be brutally murdered. Julie and her friends, a tight clique of privileged high schoolers, aren’t sure if it’s a practical joke until news arrives that a victim of Albert’s bullying pranks has escaped from a mental hospital. Only as the group’s numbers dwindle do they realize someone is using their posts on the app to stalk them.

So far this year, I’ve seen about one-hundred-and-fifty new releases. Of course, lots of them were absolutely terrific and, naturally, a lot of these were just downright terrible. And yet, today, I’ve seen the worst film of the year so far – David Lipper‘s Death Link – a ridiculously stupid, uneventful, corny, undeveloped, uninspired ripoff of both Share or Die and Countdown, two bad films in their own right. But out of the three, this is without a doubt the worst.

Where does one even start when it comes to describing Death Link? For starters, it’s incredibly boring which absolutely should not be the case. I mean, come on, this is yet another film where a “killer app” sort of premise has been executed poorly and I don’t know why it keeps happening. There are so many interesting and highly entertaining things that could be done with a film about some sort of killer social media craze/phone/app and yet each time it’s been done, it sucks.

Characters here are basically non-existent. I mean, seriously, what characters are even in this film? They’re all outrageously underdeveloped to the point where, at the end of the film, I truly didn’t feel as though I knew who anybody was. Of course, not in a literal sense. Who are these people aside from being pawns in a game of a “slasher”? They just exist to eventually be killed off later on. We need some depth. You can’t give us an array of characters and tell us to care about them only because they’re our lead characters – that’s just a bad reason.

The storyline is also incredibly underdeveloped. By the time the film’s credits roll, you’ll more than likely be more confused than satisfied. Sure, we get some answers along the way but even the ones we do get feel so predictable and unsatisfying, not to mention cringe-worthy. Speaking of cringe-worthy, almost all of this film’s dialogue is truly terrible. The script by Dustin Dinoff and Duncan Forster is one of the worst of the entire year so far. It’s almost as if they didn’t care one bit about making an admirable movie.

I really do feel bad for all of the actors involved though, because they seem quite talented and I’m sure they could all deliver good performances – it’s just that this film was not the right one to display these talents. Death Link is one of those movies that’s truly so bad and painful that you just have to see it to believe it.