Chain Letter is not very good. I can relax my standards for horror movies typically if it has some redeeming qualities. An interesting character or a cool villain or unique plot are all components that can get me through. This movie lacked all of these and really lacked any hope of being a decent movie.

The movie seems so similar to any horror movie that it's hard to find anything it does well. If you like gruesome deaths, than it has a couple unique "chain related" moments. Other than that, the movie is shallow story wise, has flat characters provides very little pay off. There isn't much suspense built up either, but certain scenes showed some promise.

I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone unless they absolutely love chains.

I'm presuming that the people who run the Encore Suspense channel make sure that the prints of movies they get are complete and that the reels are shown in correct order. With this, it was hard to tell.

The main characters are high school students whose lives glide along without parents. At any hour of the day or night they are always in their huge homes all by themselves or, at best, with another teenager.

There are adults in the story, two police officers who do have the best of intentions. Sergeant Hamill at least tries to solve the murders that form the core of the plot, but her part is so underwritten that her character could have been eliminated. Detective Crenshaw is more interesting because he has absolutely no common sense. He'll follow up a lead at an isolated location all by himself, never calling for backup, never taking even the most minimal precautions.

The biggest item in the film's budget was probably the rain machines which make remind the viewer of how much more effective BLADE RUNNER was on every count. It rains at night. It rains during the day. Worst of all, it continues raining during a funeral scene where the rain is in sharp contrast to the bright sunlight we see everywhere.

The plot has to do with some anti-technology nuts who hate computers and cell phones, so they kill off teenagers who use these devices. It would have made more sense had they targeted, maybe, the CEO of Apple, but that would have been some work for the writers. The plot device is based on killing anyone who fails to forward a chain letter. Fortunately for the killers, none of these teenagers forwards the chain to anyone who lives outside of Sacramento. That was nice of the kids.

Don't try too hard to guess the killer's (or killers') identity, because that's a little detail the writers forgot to include. The movie does not end, it simply stops.

For what it's worth, though, the last ninety seconds actually did make me jump and that one moment is truly shocking. It comes out of nowhere, but it is effective.

There are a few good things about the film. There's nice camera work with some well done crane shots, and the musical score is pretty well textbook but appropriate. But the writing is terrible, although I'd suspect that there were many scenes that were written and may or may not have been filmed that would have tied the story together into a cohesive whole.

I give this movie 3 stars, almost solely because it has the doctor from Deadwood in a fairly prominent role. Performances hearken back to the days of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and related slasher movies of the '90s, so the usual 20-somethings playing high schoolers badly. The kills were predictable and always had the gimmick of using chains in some way, which was kinda fun, but was way overdone.

This is all expected in this genre, but the worst is the ending: THERE ISN'T ONE. You barely find out who the killer(s) are, it shows the main character (if she can be called that) being killed, then it throws up the title card and rolls the credits. I know they're probably trying to set up for a sequel, but it ends up looking like they ran out of budget after they filmed an hour and a half of footage.

Don't bother with this one. You can find better uses of your time.