Because of all the snow and ice that hit Dallas earlier this month, I’ve been running a week behind when it comes to going to the movies.  For instance, I was planning on seeing The Roommate when it first opened but, because of the weather, I didn’t get a chance to see it until this previous Saturday.  I ended up seeing the movie at the AMC Valley with Jeff, my sister Erin, my friend Evelyn and her boyfriend Steven, Evelyn’s younger sister Emma, and finally Katrina, who works with my sister Erin. 

Now, you may be asking — why were so many people required just for me to see one movie?  Well, The Roommate didn’t look like a film to be seen alone.  It looked like a film that was meant to be  seen in a group of people.  The Roommate looked like the type of campy, silly little film that demanded some audience participation.  At least, that’s what it looked like.  However, as we watched the movie, it quickly became apparent that this film was neither campy nor silly.  Instead, it was just — well, it was just there.

In the Roommate, Minka Kelly plays a poor girl from Iowa who leaves home to attend college in California.  She’s a design major or something like that though she’s going to one of those movie colleges that is exclusively populated by models and where you’re only actually require to attend one class (and that class, of course, is taught by Billy Zane).  Anyway, Kelly has been randomy assigned a roommate and it turns out to be Leighton Meester.  Kelly and Meester hit it off but it quickly becomes evident that Meester has some issues.  Soon, she’s stalking all of Kelly’s other friends, cutting herself to get attention, and eventually revealing herself to be a comic book super villain.  Kelly, for her part, refuses to accept that Meester’s crazy until after the first murder has been committed and yet no one really gets upset at her for that.  Seriously, couldn’t one person have said, “You know, if you hadn’t been such a clueless idiot, a lot of trouble could have been avoided.” 

It’s a sad fact of life that most movies are rather forgettable.  Who hasn’t had the experience of sitting through a movie and then realizing, a few hours later, that you really can’t remember much about what you’ve just seen?  A similar thing happened to me when I saw The Roommate except, as opposed to forgetting about it after I saw it, I actually forgot about it while I was watching.  After about half-an-hour into the film, we all stopped paying attention and instead, me, Erin, Emma, and Evelyn started to whisper about old episodes of The O.C. and Buffy the Vampire Slayer while Jeff and Steve started to talk about sports and Katrina ended up spending the whole movie flirting with the guy sitting behind us (which I don’t think his girlfriend appreciated since she kept going “shhhhhhh!” in this really annoying, obnoxious way).  Every once in a while, I would look up at the screen and think to myself, “Oh yeah, there’s a movie playing” but, quite frankly, I never saw anything on-screen that would justify making any more than a minimum effort to pay attention.  That’s just the type of film The Roommate is.  It takes the old Radiohead song about no surprises, please to heart.

What makes this disappointing is that, concept-wise, the movie has potential.  Everyone has had that one friend that has turned out to be just a little bit too clingy for comfort.  Most of us have had more than a few.  As well, your first few semesters of college are supposed to be all about figuring out who you really are.  Are you gay, straight, or somewhere in between?  Are you a good girl or are you a bad girl?  Are you a rebel or are you a conformist?  At least that’s how I remember my first semester of college and, for me, my randomly-selected roommate was the key to answering so many of those questions.  I imagine that’s the way it is for a lot of people.  The best horror often has some sort of tenuous connection with reality so The Roommate had a chance to be, at the very least, a fun little B-movie.

Unfortunately, effective horror also requires a willingness to risk alienating the audience and The Roommate is too concerned with maintaining its PG-13 rating to take that risk.  That PG-13 rating means, in short, no nudity, no blood, and no darkness.  Instead of truly exploring the premise for all that its worth, The Roommate is more concerned with being safe for tweens and teenagers.  That was the majority of the audience when we saw the film and seeing how much they appeared to be enjoying the film made me feel really, really old.  Of course, to be honest, I probably would have enjoyed the movie to if I was only 15 years old and I’d never actually seen a good horror movie before.

However, no film is totally useless and The Roommate did inspire me to start concealing a pocket knife underneath the clasp of my bra, like Leighton Meester does in this movie.  That may be the best development in self-defense since I finally figured out how to use pepper spray without spraying it in my face.