The Chatroom Trailer: Sad Face Emoticon

By being both an entry in the Un Certain Regard category at this year's Cannes Film Festival and also the latest from famed Japanese horror director Hideo Nakata (the original versions of The Ring and Dark Water), Chatroom is saddled with a lot of advance expectations. And once the trailer begins with the sound of a modem dialing up, you unfortunately know it won't possibly be able to match them. Log on to Prodigy and check it out.

The three-minute trailer has some interesting visuals -- namely that the titular online repositories are imagined as actual rooms where the young members sit around and talk about their feelings -- but everything about it feels derivative: There's Kick-Ass star Aaron Johnson menacing a group of impressionable youngsters like a high school-aged Tyler Durden; there's the Matrix-y vibe that the world of the chatroom's gives off; and there's even some web-based drama that will either remind you of Swimfan, Untraceable or both. Needless to say, Ringu this is not.

And while it's only a trailer, the biggest crime of all is that Chatroom appears to look deadly boring. Forget that it feels like a refugee from the fall of 1999 -- in an alternate reality, Chatroom starred James van der Beek and Lacey Chabert -- for a master thriller like Nakata, where are the thrills? Knowing Cannes, the scariest part of Chatroom might be the audience reaction.

VERDICT: Pass.

[Dread Central]