Four former high school friends gather for a final party together to celebrate the New Year. What Danielle doesn’t know, is the other three girls have devised a plan to expose her past and ruin her future. Things don’t go as planned when Danielle turns out to be a manipulative psychopath. If you don’t want spoilers then I suggest you stop reading now, because I have no reservations about spoiling this movie, if only to save you the time I wasted.

Apparently this movie is part of a series of Hulu-original horror movies, which I didn’t know going in. I found myself browsing horror movies on Hulu one night and came across this. The idea of a modern New Year’s themed horror movie intrigued me; the last one I watched was, I believe, New Year’s Evil from 1980. This also had the Blumhouse seal of approval, so how bad could it be?

Extremely.

The acting is so horrendous that it actually makes me feel bad criticizing them for it. Have you ever seen acting that looks so unnatural and awkward that it just makes you uncomfortable for watching it? That’s how I felt watching this. The weird editing style didn’t help the dialogue, which was jumpy and confusing on its own, but for some reason they decided to include flashbacks (or flash forwards?) spliced into random scenes. It doesn’t feel like we really get a sense of who each character is beyond their blank, hollow delivery of a memorized line of dialogue. With 90 minutes to work with and only 4 characters, they had plenty of time to build character development, but the movie ended with me feeling like I didn’t know who anyone was.

Speaking of not knowing who the characters are, I found it incredibly unbelievable that so many of them would so easily transition from normal to murderer. I just don’t buy it. I could see the main character, Alexis, becoming a murderer, since so much time was spent portraying she was crazy, but even then I would have to think it wouldn’t be an easy transition. They all turned on each other so quickly, and with such hostility, it didn’t really make sense. Combined with the terrible dialogue and jumpy editing, I couldn’t find any real moment of suspense in this movie.

I can only hope the other chapters of this “Into the Dark” series take themselves more seriously, because this felt like it was sloppily thrown together and rushed out just for the sake of New Year’s.

This movie is…

Not worth watching, even on New Year’s.

Cheers and goodnight.