Look, to anyone who is reaminding you that during quarantine, or the many quarantines that were necessary to stop the spread of the plauge in 1592, 1603 (which was particularly lethal) and then again in 1606, all in London where he worked, Shakespeare wrote King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra (all around the same year, 1606) let me tell you this: they clearly don't seem to understand the crushing anxiety of living in today's world. Some of us won't produce the next King Lear under quarantine. Some of us will just get drunk and watch three movies a day and that's fine. This for sure isn't King Lear. But it is still a refreshing and surprisingly scary and entertaining horror for this particular time we are all living in. Rob Savage, the director, and anyone that worked on this movie, that unfolds entirely on Zoom, seemed to have had a lot of fun working on it. The tension is good, so are the jump scares, and it's enough to distract someone from the real terror unfolding outside. This horror desktop movie owes I think a lot to Paranormal Activity (the first one at leat). It's lean, effective, not to heavy on the mythology of the story, a fun 56 minutes that go by seamlessly. While with other movies told through a desktop maybe I find myself asking "ok, cool but why?" this instead feels very appropriate, especially with some laugh out loud moments at the absurdity of Zoom glitches or the 40 minutes limit of the free account. For me it's a 7.0/10. It might not linger very long after you've watched it, but it's a smart movie built utilizing the anguish we are all feeling right now in quarantine.

Well then, I guess the glitch didn't just typed.

So 'Host' is a horror "movie" that was filmed entirely using Zoom during the COVID-19 lockdown. Some spooky stuff happens with a demotic demon and one by one everybody is killed off. It's like 'Unfriended’ but Zoom. There's also 2018 'Searching' starring John Cho, even though that isn't a horror movie. Basically, this concept of the whole movie taking place on a laptop or any online chat site isn't anything new. 'Host' doesn't add anything new to this concept and instead plays on predicable scares with no imagination behind it.

This feels like one of those "we need to get a movie out that's relevant with references to the outside world like masks, Covid, Zoom, etc." Zero artistic integrity, just boring and poorly put together. Just because its topical doesn't mean it's good.

I thought it was poorly acted, as I didn't fully believe them as the characters. They don't talk or act like real people. It was just so awkward and unnatural, especially at the beginning which was so painful to sit through.

The movie felt like a waste of time, despite the movie being 57 minutes long. I mean this is barely a movie. What's more insulting is that they added a seven-minute actual Zoom call with the cast and crew doing a seance, because I guess they wanted to pad out the runtime so it's feature length. Man fuck this movie. The more I write and let things sink in, the angrier I'm getting.

There was literally a scene when a demon throws a beer bottle at someone's head and it was so unintentionally hilarious that it came off as slapstick. I also noticed one of the actor’s broke character at one point when one of sneeze during a serious and scary moment; I could see them holding back laughter before going back into scared and upset mood. It was so bad.

The only positive thing I can say about this piece of shit is that at least it's short, even if it does end on a final jump scare, because we all know that great horror movies end like that.

I wish my Zoom calls were as eventful as this.

I had my reservations about Host. Zoom became very popular during the pandemic, but that doesn't mean that people are clamoring for movies about other people using Zoom. That said, I admit that Host won me over little by little.

It's nowhere near perfect; the characters stay logged onto their Zoom sessions much longer than any sane person would, considering what they go through. Not only do they spend an inordinate amount of time in front of their computers, but on the rare occasions they go elsewhere – which is never too far –, they make sure to bring their laptops along (one even falls to the ground dragging his computer with them, the device managing to land at a perfect angle to continue following the action).

This is not how real persons would react; it's how characters in a script behave. I understand that their monitors are our windows to the their world, and without them we would be left in the dark, but I'm more willing to believe in an evil spirit than in the perfect ubiquity of a video camera.

Having said that, let's move on to the good stuff. This is a very well paced film. Director/co-writer Rob Savage is fully aware that his premise isn't sustainable in the long run, but he doesn't jump the gun either.

Clocking in at 56 minutes, the movie its short enough to avoid tedium, but also patient enough to take the time to establish its characters. Do we feel like we've known them forever? Of course not, but there are five main characters, and each emerges as a distinct individual with a clear-cut personality.

Additionally, Host has effective practical effects and genuine scares; the chair that moves with a person sitting on it reminded me of Poltergeist, and I also enjoyed the footsteps that appear on spilled flour on the floor, the bottle that takes off and crashes on a character's head, the moment when one of them throws a sheet into the air and instead of falling to the floor it hangs in the shape of a human body, and finally the last shot of the film, just before the computer runs out of battery (there is another incident that I prefer not to reveal, hoping it will have the same impact on future viewers as it did on me).

Generally this type of movie falls short in the character development and special effects departments. Host gives us human beings and surrounds them with phenomena that convincingly turn these humans into victims; without realistic effects we would never believe these people were truly in danger, but most of the credit goes to the performances. If the actresses weren't able to foster empathy I wouldn't care if they stayed where they were or took their laptops with them or not, but they are and I do.