Smiley (2012)

What it’s about: After discovering an urban legend of a demented serial killer, who has nothing but a carved 'smiley' on his face, a mentally fragile teen must decide whether she is going insane - or will be the next victim.

Review: Smiley is, for all intents and purposes, a generic slasher flick. But is it a successful slasher flick? Well, this is where people might be divided. Me, I know exactly where I fall in the spectrum of people who will consume this film, but first lets go over the finer points of it before we get to a conclusion. Smiley, the titular character, is an urban legend that grew out of the internet’s backwater forums not unlike 4chan, creepypasta, etc. And he’s only got one thing inside his smiley little head. Or rather, big head… It looks kind of like a growth, doesn’t it?

Now hold on...I didn't mean anything by that...

The film itself follows a group of college coeds, our main girl being Ashley. She’s new to the college experience and fresh off the pain of losing her mother to suicide. The film does its best to try and make Ashley into an unreliable narrator, trying to make you believe that she’s probably delusional and everything that you see is really just her perceptions messing with her mind. This sort of thing doesn't really work as the film opens up with Smiley taking down his first victim -- so, from the audience's perspective, we've already established Smiley as "real."

The group of people she ends up befriending,  a bunch of “hacktivists” who pride themselves on doing nothing more than playing elaborate jokes on others, introduce her to the idea of Smiley. This online entity is summoned by repeating thrice the phrase “I did it for the lulz” in an anonymous online camera chat room. Which, by the way, is called hide-and-go chat; for some reason they name drop Skype, but we can’t call chatroulette what it is?

As though penises weren't enough to keep people off of chatroulette!

The issues with the film are plentiful. First, it’s doing what a dozen other slasher films have done before it – and not in a good way, either. The key to a good slasher is to make your audience care about the people you’re killing, and here we just have a bunch of idiot college students who think they’re hot shit. Basically nothing more than your generic run-of-the-mill cannon fodder.  

We even get to a point where Smiley is taking on aspects of Freddie Krueger by going at the main character through her dreams. There’s no tension in the film, no good scares, and not even any real interesting gore. So how about Smiley’s origins? Maybe that’s something that can be considered worth spending the time to watch this film.

Doesn't really have the same ring to it as "Candyman, Candyman, Candyman," does it?

Sadly, that’s not the case. Unlike Bloody Mary or the notorious Candyman, Smiley doesn’t content itself with a simple origin story that might tug on the heartstrings. Then again, when you’re dealing with the internet, that kind of thing doesn’t really work, does it? The film attempts to go a more intelligent route, claiming that Smiley is an evolutionary stage of humanity. That the whole idea of the world coming into being is for something like Smiley to eventually be created – that or he’s simply the next step after humanity. He is not a byproduct of humanity like so many urban myths, but a direct result. 

Honestly, it's a bit much to try and tack on to a generic slasher film, but it's a little bit of a gem that could have been interesting, had the acting, script, and general unfolding of the movie not bogged it down so much.

The ending doesn’t even make up for anything, being as predictable as everything that preceded it. Essentially the phrase, “I did it for the lulz,” is a description of how people view their moral values in this day and age. People wield immense abilities to do good and evil, and yet people consistently do something “simply because they can.” And if you catch on to what that phrase means, you should sniff out the ending long before the credits begin to roll.

Overall, I would give Smiley a pass, because there’s really nothing to see here.