The perils of life on-line

The unexpected results of cyberbullying.

If you spend much of your day staring at a computer screen, you'll either be put off by the new horror film Unfriended or sucked in by its user-friendly familiarity.

Set in Fresno, Ca. -- or rather in a variety of semi-sloppy bedrooms in Fresno -- Unfriended is an unapologetic gimmick movie that gets much further than you might have thought possible considering that the movie confines itself to a single computer screen.

The characters in Unfriended -- six teen-agers engaged in a SKYPE call -- simultaneously chat, send messages to one another, look stuff up on Google and show their dexterity at multitasking.

The amazing thing about the movie (which does, I think, eventually wear out) is that director Levan Gabriadze and screenwriter Nelson Greaves actually keep you watching: Of course, they toss sexual tensions, jealousy, teen posturing, tech savvy and horror into the mix.

If you're looking to be scared out of your mind, you may be disappointed by what amounts to a horror sketch that takes place in real time, and which eliminates the need for great camera work. We are, after all, looking at SKYPE images on screens.

Oh yeah, the story:

It seems that a teenager named Laura committed suicide after being humiliated by the posting of an on-line video that went viral.

Early on, a stranger horns in what appears to be a typical on-line session of the movie's teen ensemble. The stranger says she's Laura, the kid who committed suicide.

This ghost in the machine is out for vengeance and even the most technically proficient of these young people can't get rid of her.

The way in which Laura (or whoever is behind all this) arranges for these youngsters to be knocked off are decidedly low-tech and not particularly inventive, even when judged by low-budget horror movie standards.

OK, I've told you the kids, who may be implicated in Laura's humiliation, are knocked off, but this information only can be regarded as a spoiler if you expected the departed Laura to provide her former classmates with links to scholarly articles on cyberbullying.

Credit director Gabriadze with being smart enough to hold his movie to an 82-minute length and for daring to do this at all. I've read about (but never seen) last year's Open Windows, which evidently used a similar gimmick to lesser effect, earning a paltry 33 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Whatever you think of either movie, it's probably a good bet that we'll see more of this or at least some creative variations, providing, of course, that we can tear ourselves away from our computer screens.

Horror in the quiet mode

It Follows treats horror as a sexually transmitted disease.

We've all seen plenty of movies in which sex mingles with danger, but few have so directly presented the perils of close encounters as It Follows, a movie that turns horror into a sexually transmitted disease.

Director David Robert Mitchell 's debut movie has received a great deal of attention, partly because it goes against the current horror grain of blood, gore and shock.

In my view, Mitchell's mood-reliant movie has been a bit over-praised, but it deserves credit for taking the usual starting point for teen horror -- sex as a transgression for which a teen-ager (usually a girl) must pay -- and pushing it into menacing terrain.

Mitchell's story revolves around Jay (Maika Monroe), a 19-year-old whose sexual encounter with a boy (Jake Weary) results in a singularly devastating consequence.

The young man is being followed by a strange, ill-defined entity that threatens his life and scares the hell out of him. The only way he can rid himself of this horrifying affliction is to pass it on to someone else through sex.

In this sexual game of tag, Jane suddenly is "it."

A disturbing premise sets up a situation in which Jay becomes keenly aware of everyone in her environment and so do we. That's the movie's biggest strength: It has us looking around every frame for trouble. It traps us in its disquiet.

The demon (I use the term as a kind of shorthand, although the movie never really tells us much about the "it" of its title) can appear in a number of guises and is visible only to the person who's being followed.

Once Jay realizes her predicament, she and her initially dubious friends must figure out a way to break the spell under which Jay has fallen.

This demon-busting crew consists of Jay's sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) and a couple of friends (Keir Gilchrist and Olivia Luccardi).

Fair to say (as many have) that It Follows is more in touch with the insistently eerie spirit of Korean horror than with American slice-and-dice cinema.

That's a definite plus, but I wouldn't say that the developments in It Follows are entirely credible, and Mitchell sometimes seems to be trying a little too hard to up the anxiety ante.

Still, if you like creepy horror, Mitchell delivers enough of it to make you wonder whether security is little more than illusion.

The score by a musician who calls himself "Disasterpeace" helps create the movie's eerie aura, although it sometimes sounds as if a jumbo jet has taken a drastically wrong turn and is roaring through your head.

Liam Neeson vs. wilderness and wolves

The Grey takes us deep into the Alaskan wild for a mixture of action and horror.

In the new movie The Grey, Liam Neeson dances with wolves that, for the most part, get the best of a band of grizzled oil rig workers who are stranded in the Alaskan wilderness after a harrowing plane crash.

I don’t know if Neeson is having trouble finding quality scripts or whether he enjoys making these kinds of movies, but he certainly gives action directors their money's worth by bringing instant gravitas to a genre that’s not always taken seriously.

In this case, Neeson – who also starred in Taken and Unknown -- has signed on for a movie that sets action and horror against an inhospitable and frozen landscape.

Once the surviving workers get their bearings, it becomes clear that they’ve quickly made the transition from gritty hard guys to potential wolf food. And it doesn’t take long for director Joe Carnahan, who directed Neeson in the A-Team, to show us the wolves, large, ferocious howlers that are naturally cunning and lacking in mercy, sort of like film critics.

Neeson’s John Ottway, an emotionally wounded man who’s charged with shooting wolves that threaten the oil workers, begins the movie at a forbidding-looking Alaskan drilling site. He's in such a distraught state that he even contemplates suicide.

Ottway obviously has known some other kind of life. He seems to have gone to Alaska in the same way that an earlier generation of movie characters joined the French Foreign Legion. I guess we’re meant to think that the plane crash forces Ottway into a last-ditch attempt at engagement.

The crew that tries to escape the crash scene with Ottway is appropriately motley. The men are differentiated from one another in mostly expected ways. Frank Grillo, for example, portrays an ex-con whose belligerence becomes his defining trait. He’s quick to challenge Ottway’s leadership, even though it’s clear that Ottway has plenty of wilderness savvy.

Obviously, many in this small band will die, and, as is often the case with such movies, you can amuse yourself by speculating about the order in which the unlucky will be picked apart by wolves. You also can brace for the film’s more “philosophical” moments, which play like so much dorm-discussion baloney.

Much is made of a poem (“Once More Into the Fray”) that Ottway says his father wrote. It’s the kind of poetry that could be appreciated only by someone who’s never read a good poem; sort of Jack London meets a Boy Scout handbook.

But if the movie has a message, you’ll find it in the poem: Grit your teeth and do battle with hostile nature.

Carnahan uses gauzy but obvious flashbacks to fill in a blank that doesn’t need filling; they explain why Ottway tends to be so damn morose.

Hey, I’m as frightened by an assortment (or so I've read) of real wolves, puppets and animatronics as the next guy. Some of the scenes in The Grey are rich with apprehension, and a few of the movie's twists even go against the grain of formula

Still, it would have taken a better-written movie to get me to leap whole-heartedly into this glum and frozen fray.