Slender Man Review: 2 Ups & 7 Downs

5. The Outrageously Terrible Dialogue

It's hard to think of another movie released this year with dialogue this aggressively awful. It certainly doesn't help that the film is written by David Birke, a middle-aged man whose attempt to write for teenage girls is, well, hysterically unconvincing.

From the horrendous early banter to shambolically self-serious lines like, "It's like a computer virus...but it's in our brains!", the poor actresses are forced to deliver some howlingly terrible dialogue with straight faces.

It's as though Birke turned in his first draft he cobbled together over a weekend, Sony figured it'd be a box office smash on brand identity alone and and didn't even bother asking him for another draft.

There's certainly the potential for a thrilling horror film in here...somewhere, but the bottom-of-the-barrel script is an absolute embarrassment.