उपयोगकर्ता समीक्षाएं

This movie was so disturbing for me knowing the dangers of the internet and that it seemed so realistic as if it happened for real. I liked the main character as well as the film it kept me in interest curious to see what's going to happen. I think that this movie has deep meanings as well especially to the young people that use these kind of sites.

This movie is very fresh and modern. I've never seen a horror movie done like this before (webcam style). I honestly don't understand all the negative reviews here. This movie was very fun to watch, made me jump a few times, and the story unwound perfectly. Don't be asking yourself "why is she filming this" - that totally defeats the purpose of storytelling. I feel like too many people might be going into this movie with high expectations? Sure there are some logical errors, but what horror movie is completely devoid of those?

Actually, don't take my review into consideration. Only consider all the other negative reviews and just give this movie a try. Then perhaps you'll like it a bit more.

I feel like the build up was great, the storytelling was fresh, and the ending was clever. The overall plot and ending might be a bit too sick and twisted for some (probably not for the average horror movie goer), but this is actually real life. There are some sick people out there and I feel like this movie made a great commentary about it.

The movie is an interesting commentary on the internet being a distraction of stupidity.

It leads people to their deaths, but people are addicted to watching others demise that it creates a sort of circle of dysfunction...

Ultimately, I was engrossed as a sort of VHS style found footage genre offering, but it did have a few interesting things to say on the entitled society we live in today, of easy gratification, replacement of impersonal and fear based living behind a screen for the beauty of the natural world.

It's available on demand, which is apropos to the plot point of the story.

This movie is a little gem. It's been out for a while, but I just saw it. I liked it. I think the story is contrived as to how to how the victim is selected and stalked, but aside from that, it works. I liked the characters. The story is simple and the scares are good. It is not a found footage movie any more than "fear dot com" or "Unfriended" would be, but it is a good entry in the social media horror sub-genre.

Cautionary tale finds a young woman, Elizabeth, receiving a grant to study the habits of webcam chat users. Elizabeth uses a site that allows her to randomly chat with literally anyone on her chat site all over the world.

Things quickly go bad as she and her friends and family are drawn into a nightmare from which they can't escape. I don't want to give anything else away as the reveals are so much fun.

This gruesome found footage horror has almost everything you could ask for in a horror movie. Parts of it almost play as a slasher and it has a lot of scares. I found references to several other popular horror movies and had a great time with this one.

If you are a fan of found footage please give it a try. Most of you won't be disappointed.

The Den takes a lot of modern references such as social media quirks and web cam gimmicks to produce a unique kind of found footage film. It's similar to series of creepy pastas on internet, and even for those who are barely familiar with the technology, the film should be relatable. Unfortunately, the conclusion isn't as strong as the set-up and some of the plots developments are too far fetch.

Elizabeth (Melanie Papalia) is a student who investigates the behavior of web cam users in a website called The Den. It's a random streaming chat site, and just like the actual thing it has a lot of dubious people. Elizabeth begins to see a lot of strange things, including potential snuff video. It escalates very closely into her real life. The premise holds a good advantage since viewers will be familiar with this set-up.

Acting is pretty good for the lead, as Melanie Papalia plays the role of modern young woman who relies on this tech. For most part she seems identifiable, and the film is at its strongest at first act. Cleverly using bits of well-known jokes or internet sensation, it grabs attention very quickly. The horror aspect is handled very well as it's based on viral spooky stories or clips which already proved effective to attract attention.

Problem starts to show at latter half as the threat is looking very omnipotent. It's almost ludicrous how it can get to Elizabeth with near supernatural tech wizardly and seemingly unworldly power. The mainstay of found footage flaws reveal themselves later on as the visual gets muddled and slow, the vexing frame rate drop is real. It also doesn't make sense why there are conveniently placed cameras, especially in first person view.

The Den resembles internet sensation it's based on, interesting at first but stumble with glitches afterward. The material is spread too thinly and the last act falters, considering the film is fairly short it could've wrapped up nicer. If not for anything, The Den has a few good internet viral scares and they are better than most found footage has to offer.

For example, when she calls her friend at her house across town to warn her of the intruder: first of all, COME ON!-- who leaves their back door unlocked for anyone to come in when they weren't even doing anything out back to begin with? Secondly, no one would be so defensive about the warning to get out of the house, coming up with the ever-typical response, "What are you talking about? WHO'S in my house?" If someone got a warning like that, that person would be freaked out immediately and be out of there in a New York minute. To make it even MORE unrealistic, she turns around, worried, when she hears something after the warning over the phone, saying, "Hello?" This one's definitely sub-par.

Here's one of those things that sound stupid if you just describe it, a horror film in the found footage mode entirely assembled via web and phone cams and mostly taking place on a laptop. No it isn't scary, the acting is below par, there's no cinematic craft, the horror plot and climax are atrociously bad, in the end it's no more than a gimmick, but for a while you can see them probing something interesting.

Part of the reason why I think it's so darn clever is in how it threads the practical limitations of what they could do on a tiny budget, around narrative limitations of how much story they could deliver within the former, around broader meta- limitations of how much is possible for a viewer to know as true, going from meagre means to the broad, perplexing questions.

Inspiration after all is nourished and energized by limits, self-imposed or from necessity like a painter has to puzzle about how he can enliven and give depth to a twodimensional surface. It's easy to think of so many things to do with a budget in the millions, which is why unconstrained imagination fizzles out, but how much can you do with just a camera?

Here it's about a viewer in the midst of images, a girl doing a behavioral study over online chat services, who like us is looking to surmise possible pattern and truth; the constraint is that we can only watch.

A lot of the time we stare into a computer environment. Jarring to see in a film but still the groundwork through which we know so many other things these days. We see through a webcam at the girl in her apartment so we acquire a sense of real time. But then things are shifted around. Videos that we were parsing as taking place now are suddenly paused. We connect to random chatters, but have no way of knowing how much is real even within the small confines of the screen. Some of them are pulling pranks, there's a startling Russian roulette scene that ends with bloodshed and everyone laughing.

Among all this is footage of a possible murder.

So this could have been great, about our inability to be grounded in a horizon of shifting images and context; a Blowup for the tumblr age. We could swim far deeper into the videos, form more ambiguous connections, play and replay edges and details, tune in and out of a far stranger parade of the visual strangeness that is taking place out there, some of it feigned, some bizarre or exciting, even stupidity or crass sex would have its place, some strangely poetic in spite of all else.

So they constrained themselves in a powerful way, but halfway through they axe all that and fall back to the convenient limits of tradition: Halloween, Scream 2, Saw and Hostel. It's a throwaway thing by the end which is a shame.

Scary, gory, more brutal and violent than I expected. Pretty tough Dark Web movie. This one is defenitely a great one and an underrated gem. It is not perfect though, especially in the story. If you chat with random strangers from allover the planet, you should expect more than lovely kind people. And this is exactly what is happening here. The other weakness is, that it is not believable. Everything the bad guys do, works perfectly fine, even if the bad guy is filming 10 cops at the crime scene...... whilst these cops are investigating at the crime scene... and whatever the good guys do, fails. Nevertheless a good scary movie.

Cause I really love found footage horrors) This little movie is not something extraordinary , but it's definitely a decent one time watch ! And a we all can't live without new technology and social media , the closer to home this movie feels)

First i want to mention that this movie has 3 reviews so far, and the 2 of them, are probably written by someone from the staff of the movie, cause both are so obvious and fake written. Especially the one with the "Warning" title. Not even a 5 year old kid would write that kind of review. As for the movie, i have to say it was boring watching it for barely 74 minutes through a web cam, smart phone cameras, mobiles and some other similar contrivances. Well yeah, it has to do with found footage stuff, but still, put a new idea on it than the usual "watching through a mobile to make it more real and scary." The story could and should have been better, but it has some empty spaces and questions while it unravels which ruins the whole attempt making this movie good or giving you something somewhat different idea or plot. The good thing, The Den has, according to me, is showing and exposing world's addiction and stupidity over the internet and social networks and chatting. Without people knowing who they're talking to, or who that person is, they expose their selves and revealing things, personal things, for no reason, just because "that's the way it is" with technology. Posting where they're about to go, where they live, what they like, uploading photos and videos of their lives and from close friends lives, can be hazardous and worse, cause they can't know what intentions have all these unknown chatters. And some of them, or many of them, might be hackers and good ones, from those who might want to mess seriously with their lives. Also it has an obvious similarity with the Hostel movie, right at the end.

Overall, it's an uninterested movie, and i don't recommend it. Only to curious ones.

3 out of 10

THE DEN is a movie in which the central conceit is that we see everything through web cameras/security cameras. The title itself refers to a video/chat communications platform like Zoom or FaceTime.

A graduate student begins a study to examine how people communicate via this platform, but then falls victim to a sinister entity that gradually takes over all aspects of her life. I use the word "entity" because for a good portion of the movie it seems like it is some kind of psycho-stalker, but then it becomes clear that this is not correct.

I had recently seen the conceptually similar (and more recent) HOST (2020) and thought that it was creative, but I have to say, this one blows it away. It takes the concept of horror via telecommunications way outside the box, and there is a story arc that transcends what one might have imagined can be done with it. From the perspective of acting, dialogue, pacing and production design the film was well-executed, so I want to focus the rest of my review on the movie's purported realism.

Whenever a work takes major creative leaps, it risks looking stupid, at least until the full implications are understood. That is true of movies as with any other work, and it is certainly true here.

Up until a third into the movie, the steady escalation of suspense and unease was not only tightly constructed, but also within the bounds of credibility. After that, the reach of the entity became so all-encompassing and what it was able to do so impervious to consequences that it strained credulity beyond the breaking point. I recall thinking to myself "this is getting really stupid!".

And then, a few minutes before the end, it suddenly became clear what this was all about due to a twist. I was actually surprised how quickly my opinion changed from "stupid" to "brilliant".

Now, some people might not buy the twist. They might dismiss the scenario as just too unrealistic. I suspect that the same people would not have bought the idea of the dark web when the internet first started to become widespread, yet here we are.

There are three interrelated reasons why the major twist at the end is believable to me, but I cannot discuss them without spoilers, so you have been warned.

1. I have noticed a recent widespread change in how certain ethical values are understood. For example, in many debates, especially of political or ideological nature, people no longer seem to care much about what is true if it clashes with their convictions. Some of it is because algorithms on social media have unintended side effects in terms of manipulating people's patterns of reasoning. Add to that the rise of sociopaths like Andrew Tate who use social media to reach hundreds of thousands of people in order to teach them how to be sociopaths. Add to that the fact that advances in technology have reduced opportunities for interpersonal interactions which in the past served as proving grounds for ethical intuitions, while at the same time enabling novel forms of unethical behavior ranging from ghosting to cyberbullying to outright online impersonation and more. I don't think we have quite come to grips yet with the ethical landscape facing us in the early 21st century.

2. The gig economy is growing and squeezing more and more people. It is not implausible that the squeeze is not just in the direction of lower-paying gigs but also gigs which have an unethical component. Already there are real-life massive call centers with the sole purpose of literally scamming people out of their life savings. They are not even that rare, having given rise to the phenomenon of youtube channels dedicated to exposing them (see kitboga and Jim Browning). People with poorly developed ethical intuitions or those having become accustomed to unethical online behavior, i.e. People discussed in the previous point, would be expected to be more likely to gravitate toward the unethical gigs. As such gigs become increasingly more common, then plausibly so does that fraction of such gigs at the ultraviolent end of the spectrum.

3. As our online lives are becoming ever more integrated with our real lives, more opportunities arise for gigs with unethical components as discussed in the previous point which exploit this integration. And with advances in technology, the reach of these could expand ever more. For example, it took a generation after the internet became widespread for organized crime to infiltrate dating apps, leading to scams like the so-called "Pig -butchering scam" which, as of this writing, most people probably have not even heard of but which has a level of sophistication most people would find hard to imagine. Most of these scams are not violent; I believe that is not so much because organized crime renounces violence but because as long as there is plenty of profit to be made by non-violent means, this path is preferred because it is less likely to lead to aggressive prosecution by law enforcement. Like anything, there is a risk/reward calculation, and if it ever tips in favor of large rewards for a little extra violence, then we will most definitely see more violence.

So, to summarize:

The first point discusses factors that provide the manpower for such operations

The second point discusses factors that provide the business environment within which such operations could become possible

The third point discusses factors that provide opportunities and incentives for such operations to rise and grow

THE DEN essentially presents a blueprint, a business model, for how to take the dark web into reality. We already have precursors such as customizable fetish videos on demand, the sale of personal information and illegal products and services, including hit man gigs, via the dark web, "swatting", suicide/gore/self-harm forums, and revenge porn.

Still, the specific business idea in the movie might not seem so realistic today, even though it is essentially just a glorified version of snuff films. But if the three factors mentioned above continue to develop as they have in the past, and there is no indication that they won't, then we may well get to some point in the future where it will no longer seem so unrealistic.

Also the execution would not need to be exactly as shown in the movie. For example, an unscrupulous platform developer could build "backdoors" access to which is sold criminal organizations for a charge in hard-to-trace digital currency. The precedent for such a scenario already exists for the NSA and other intelligence services. Or a criminal organization might commission the creation of such a platform in order to create themselves a source of future victims. The organization itself might be made up of autonomous units, rather than a tightly structured hierarchy, which would make it much harder to recognize that it is really organized crime at work, let alone dismantle it.

We should not underestimate humanity when it comes to devising new methods of crime for profit.

Elizabeth "Liz" Benton (Melanie Papalia) convinces her Research Advisor Sally (Saidah Arrika Ekulona) to research every type of strangers in the social media "The Den" to her project. She has conversation also with her boyfriend Damien Clark (David Schlachtenhaufen), her friends Max (Adam Shapiro) and Jenni (Katija Pevec) and her pregnant sister Lynn Benton (Anna Margaret Hollyman) through The Den while collecting data for her work. Liz does not note that her computer is hacked by a stranger without webcam, and hers records Damien and she while having sex. Out of the blue, the stranger shows a gagged woman being murdered to Liz and she shows the video to Sgt. Tisbert (Matt Riedy). Although he says that the video appears to be genuine, he tells her that most of them are fake, and he does not have resources to investigate. Liz asks Max to hack the user, but he says that he is probably using VPN making impossible to track him down. Soon Damien, Jenni and Elizabeth are abducted by hooded men and brought to a derelict building in a junkyard. Who are they and why are they so interested in Liz and her friends?

"The Den" (2013) is a good movie using the terrible found-footage style with a good plot about the dangers of social media and hackers. The story follows the graduate student Elizabeth that proposes to research users of social media to analyze their behaviors online and stumbles upon a gang of filmmakers of snuff films. She is hacked and endangers her sister and friends. The plot has creepy and gruesome moments, and how the police is not prepared to handle cybernetic crimes. The hopeless conclusion is sad and will certainly not please some viewers. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Clausura" ("Enclosure")

Got boring less than half way through. acting was decent. lots of unrealistic scenarios bothered me though. unresolved answers left at the end as well.