Clickbait

MOVIE #1,384 • 🍿🍿 • 02.20.24 I added the 2021 Adrian Grenier vehicle Clickbait to my watchlist because I thought it would be a fun hate-watch. Then I discovered there was another Clickbait made three years earlier and here we are. The two-sentence logline for this very low-budget stinker: “A popular vlogger, Bailey, is upset when she loses her status on vlogging site, str33ker.com [still an active promotional website! click if you dare] to a competing creator who is diagnosed with cancer. When Bailey starts getting stalked, her popularity rises again, and she is not so eager to have the crime solved.” It’s REAL bad. It’s dead heat between what’s worse: the acting or the screenplay or the loud annoying soundtrack or the general aesthetic or [fill in the blank]. I don't like shitting on such small indie productions but there's simply nothing here.

There are fake commercials for nuclear pop tarts which let the audience know that somebody saw Tim and Eric one time. 'Toot Strudels' is having a competition for best Str33ker clip to win a lifetime supply of Toot Strudels. I can’t. The lingo they made up for this sucks, but it’s also unnecessary (videos/posts are called flashes?) — they kind of make fun of this element, but it still doesn’t work. I found myself dying to watch the Netflix schlock Clickbait (2021) less than ten minutes into this and when I finally decided to bail less than half through sub-80-minute run-time, I discovered that Clickbait (2021) wasn’t in fact a Netflix film but a Netflix SERIES. With eight 45-minute+ episodes! And I’m sorry but I’m not devoting a Béla Tarr length of time to that. So I decided to pivot and watch the most recent Adrian Grenier feature film instead.

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Clickbait is a 2018 social satire horror film directed by Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein. The film is an exploration of the pressures on people to have performative identities and to seek popularity. The film satirizes not only social media, but the way in which social media is used to sell advertising for mundane products, specifically the invented radioactive toaster pastry, Toot Strudels. The film won the award for "Best Feature" at the Starburst 2019 Fantasy Film Awards. It was released on August 1, 2018.