"Smiley" - - 4 out of 5 Dentists Agree This Movie Sucks

*I am writing this review against my will but such is the arduous job of a critic. If I never wrote this, then I would eventually forget I ever saw it. But . . .my sanity must be sacrificed for the greater good.

There is a scene in "Smiley" about 20 minutes in where a bunch of people at an Anonymous party begin throwing empty beer cans at a guy named Binder while chanting "Pedobear! Pedobear! Does this get your Seal of Approval?!"

If nothing in the above sentence makes much sense to you; congratulations: You are a NORP. That's a Normal Ordinary Responsible Person. That's basically someone who uses the Internet for normal things like emails or reading the news. Maybe you chat once in a while with people around your age with similar interests.

You know, normal and ordinary stuff.

I knew exactly what they were talking about because I, like millions of others, exist primarily on the Internet and if we are disconnected it from it for too long we just bumble around like worker ants who had their scent trail wiped out. We tend to think of ourselves like Neo from "The Matrix" but really, come on, we're all just Pearl from "Blade."

So here's the thing: If you are a NORP, the Internet slang is so deep in parts of this movie that you'll feel like you're a middle-class white guy who walked on to the set of one of The Game's music videos. You will literally have no idea what anyone is talking about.

*Editor's Note: If you are a middle-class white guy and you walk into an area with a bunch of gang bangers and The Game is not present, you are most likely not in a music video and should leave immediately.

"So if I'm not a NORP, this movie must be good then," you ask, or better put, type with Cheetos- stained fingertips. Not so fast, my basement dweller friend. See, this movie straddles the fine line I like to call "Cop Drama Tech Talk." It's technical jibber-jabber that sounds authentic to a NORP but to us, it's just random words.

Let's go back to the Pedobear example. Pedobear and his "Seal of Approval" is a joke involving pictures of underage children. But Binder is actually anti-Child Porn (Gasp, I know! What an outside way of thinking!) and reported the posting of child porn to the moderators of a website so why are people are throwing beer cans at him while calling HIM a child molesting bear?

Oh, and the people who are pro-Child Porn, yeah, they're some of the guys we're supposed to be rooting to not get killed by Smiley.

Confused yet? Oh, we haven't even started.

"Smiley" is about an Internet boogeyman named Smiley who attacks someone if you type "I Did If For The Lulz" three times while chatting with them on video. The first victim is the drop dead gorgeous babysitter played by Nikki Limo.

So hot. So very, very hot.

But anyways she gets stabbed in the chest so she's gone. We then meet two other cute girls who are college roomies who meet on the Internet, and go to the Anonymous party, and watch an Anti-Child Porn crusader get ran out of a house while doing nothing about it, then they watch the video of the babysitter getting stabbed.

So dead. So very, very dead. But still hot.

So the plot goes on that these two girls, Ashley and "Proxy," jump on a ChatRoulette-style website and test out the "I did it for the lulz" on some guy with a "tiny, bent dick" (luckily we were spared that shot). Smiley jumps up and kills him and they freak out.

The rest of the movie is Ashley and Proxy running around alternately doing research on Smiley and going to parties. The rest of the Anonymous crowd is getting killed by Smiley. Ashley keeps hearing her dead mom's voice in her head. Turns out her mother killed herself and Ashley just got off her bi-polar medication 6 months ago. She goes to a shrink and tells the counselor that a man named Smiley is appearing behind her friends and killing them on video. The counselor nods slowly, then gives a prescription for a sleeping tranquilizer and is told to come back tomorrow.



"My references? Well, I've worked at Virginia Tech, the University of Colorado,
Columbine High School . . ."

In the end, after Proxy goes to stay at her parents house for the weekend, leaving Ashley all alone, a bunch of ridiculous events happen causing Ashley to shoot Binder in the chest because she thinks he's Smiley but POW the real Smiley appears but POP BOOM there are like ten more Smileys and they all chase her through the house and she jumps out a window of a second story house and smashes her brains all over the sidewalk!

"Oh no, my brains! I needed those for that math test tomorrow!"

Then all the Smiley's take their masks off . . .they were just trolling her the whole time!

"Soon the whole world won't know our names!"

See, it all makes sense! The Internet is full of trolls, right? So what's to stop them from teaming up to make a girl think she is being stalked by a supernatural killer called Smiley just to make her kill herself?! It's genius. All the videos were fake . . .even the hot babysitter was in on it from the beginning!

She even wears diamond earrings and make-up under a Smiley mask to a murder party. Damn, she's hot.

I mean, it's not like they could just do that by, I don't know, normal bullying. Like, just going to some girl's Facebook page everyday and call her a fat whore until she kills herself . . .nah, that's too unrealistic.

I do have a couple of questions though. How were they able to fake her dead mom's voice? Binder, the "Pedobear" guy was in on it, so is he really pro-child porn? And when they were deciding who to be killed and in what order, who raised their hand and said "I'll be the guy with tiny, bent dick! I was born to play that part!"



We all were, brother. We all were.

Of course, because the universe loves to torture me, there is not only one but TWO twist endings and one of them is beyond unbelievable. And that's saying a lot because the first twist is that Smiley IS real and it kills Proxy.

The second, even more unrealistic twist than a supernatural Internet hacking serial killer, comes after the credits:

She didn't die! Wow, she survived that fall, that sure is a miracle. Hopefully the ten serial killers in her house don't happen to walk outside right then and see her sit up. Also, before the end of the credits we see her Ethics teacher deliver a long speech about good and evil while staring at her empty seat . . .but she comes back to life at night . . .so was she laying there for like two days and then come back to life, or did she come back to life and get knifed to death by the aforementioned party of sociopaths just 20 feet away or (most likely) suffer such severe brain damage that she couldn't make it to class the next day.

Well I guess we'll know how severe the brain damage is if she ever decides to star in "Smiley 2.0"

"Smiley" is a lot like the Internet itself: it's full of beautiful women, trolls, and people who think they are making a point about the nature of humanity when really they are just quoting the backs of psychology textbooks. This movie is a pass for all but the most masochistic and bored of the human species.