My quick rating - 1.9/10. Somewhere between a failed TikTok challenge and a rejected student film lies Red Static Rising, a 65-minute endurance test disguised as a psychological horror flick. Two girls — Iris (Julia Burenok) and Tina (Maryjane Zazueta) — spend their summer break at an isolated house, where a “nightmarish presence” apparently distorts their reality. In practice, that means bad lighting, bad acting, and enough shaky camera work to make The Blair Witch Project look like The Shawshank Redemption.
The film kicks off with the pair arguing about walking a mile. Not ten. Not uphill. Just one measly mile. If that doesn’t scream “low stakes horror,” I don’t know what does. From there, the dialogue spirals into a mix of whining, confusion, and the kind of improvised nonsense that makes you wonder if there was ever a script at all.
Iris, bless her heart, reacts to entering an average house like she’s just inherited Downton Abbey. Tina, on the other hand, spends a good chunk of the runtime convulsing down a hallway while eerie background “chamber music” drones endlessly in the background, like someone forgot to turn off the royalty-free track they found on YouTube.
There are attempts at special effects, if you can call them that. Think TikTok filters gone wrong — complete with a disappearing trick so botched they literally moved the camera mid-pause. The plastic knives make their grand debut in the “climactic” stabbing sequence, where multiple blows somehow draw less blood than a paper cut. It’s like watching an AI-generated slasher scene written by someone who’s never seen blood or a slasher.
Out of nowhere, both actresses decide to bare all, perhaps as revenge against a doubting partygoer who once said they’d never show their tits. My initial thought was “high school project,” but the sudden nudity bumps it up to “college film class,” or possibly “drunken dare.”
A creepy latex-masked figure eventually pops up, because apparently no horror movie is complete without one, but his purpose — much like the title — remains an unsolved mystery. What is Red Static Rising? The girls ask the question several times, and by the end, I found myself muttering the same answer: “I don’t care.”
The film has no plot, no tension, and no reason to exist other than to prove two things: you can make a “horror” movie entirely in your own house, assuming you can find a neighbor's place that is also under construction, and you can survive it if you take your top off. If Red Static Rising proves anything, it’s that not all film projects need to be submitted — and some TikTok effects are better left unrisen.
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