Fear Itself (2007)

Marshall and his girlfriend Julia, Brad and his girlfriend Chelsea, and their friend Taylor love pulling pranks on people.  However their idea of pranks are actually malicious.  When a teen accidentally spills soda on Marshall, they humiliate him by pulling off his swim trunks and gathering a crowd to laugh at him.  They shoot Megan with paintball guns in the middle of cheerleaders practice while she's being held high in the air. This causes her to fall to the ground and hurt her ankle.  And for some reason the gang thinks using foul smelling paint will make her unpopular.

A few days later when Megan hobbles up on her crutches and tells them someday someone will make them pay for their stunts, they all scoff.

Marshall decides their pranks need to go further.  He wants to find out someones deepest fear and then torture them with it.  For example, if someone was afraid of spiders, they'd throw them in a box full of spiders.  Yeah, Marshall's a swell guy.

They decide to invite a guy who has a crush on Taylor to party at a cabin.  Then they start talking about what they fear and the guy reveals he has claustrophobia.  Shortly after that, they slip him a mickey.  When he wakes up, he's in a pine coffin and they're throwing dirt on it.  Needless to say, he freaks out.  I think anyone would freak out even if they didn't have claustrophobia.

The prank goes wrong when the hole they dug caves in and they have to dig him out.  Geez guys, couldn't you just pretend he's in a hole and throw dirt on the coffin?  It's not like he'd know the difference.  Once they dig out the coffin, they pull him out, find him unconscious, anonymously call 911, and leave him there.  Great job, jerks.

This is a movie where I saw the opening scene, and thought "uh oh."  It appears to be shot on digital video.  The sound seems to have been recorded live since the background noise is loud. At one point the background music is mixed louder than the dialogue.  The title sequence and all the music are right out of a soap opera.  During Chelsea's family scenes, the mic overloads.  A whole segment in and around a house is filmed in fog vision, but I think it's some sort of soft focus or after effect. Either way there's no reason for it so it's just confusing.  Also Chelsea's family listens to soft jazz during dinner.  And geez people,  can we please have an accident scene where the characters don't turn the victims head to see if they're okay?

Also confusing is when Brad does this amazing dive into the pool, Chelsea gets upset and tells him to stop doing stunts as she couldn't bear to lose him.  Huh?  It was a fantastic twisting, rolling dive that could only be done by someone who knew how to dive. It's not some idiot flailing off the diving board.

The biggest problem with this type of movies is you just don't like any of the characters.  How can we like people who think it's fun to humiliate others, and have no regard for anyone elses feelings?  Also it really isn't a prank when you're targeting people you want to get even with for something they did, even accidentally.