Worst Clip on the Internet: We Are Your Enemies
Movie trailers are the best thing on earth. It’s like watching a whole movie but just the highlights reel! It’s full of montages and adrenaline and swelling music! Even better than a good movie trailer is a bad movie trailer. It has all the fun of watching a bad movie, except you only have to watch a few minutes.
Some favorite bad movie trailers include A Dog’s Purpose, Dolphin Tale 2, and Mother’s Day. But those are bad in a funny way. The trailer for We Are Your Friends is different. It’s demonic. It’s dark sided. It’s one of the worst clips on the internet!

I’m sorry if you never knew this movie existed but your time of ignorant bliss is over. We Are Your Friends is a 2015 film written and directed by Max Joseph, who is the gray-haired sidekick on Catfish. The movie stars Zac Efron as an aspiring EDM DJ (just that sentence gives me hives). It also stars Emily Ratajkowski, who I can’t even look at. She’s one of those women always telling other women to accept their bodies but she’s a Sports Illustrated model so it’s like Simone Biles telling everyone to do backflips.
We open with a shot of Zac Efron jogging in distress (but not actual distress, just the kind you might feel if you’re Zac Efron and suddenly realize you have bad taste). A voice over abruptly cuts in, and Zac starts listing off complaints about the modern world.
“Study halls. SATs. Liberal arts. Student loans. Layoffs. Bailouts. Broken dreams. This is NOT our future.”



His tone is that of someone reading a powerful monologue, but it’s just a loose list of words with no context. When he says “liberal arts,” there is a hint of disdain, like the way Bill O’Reilly says “liberal media.” What did liberal arts ever do to him? Maybe he was talking about that shitty Josh Radnor movie, Liberal Arts. Yeah that’s probably it.
Zac Efron is still narrating, asserting that things are different for our generation! You can invent an app or start a blog or sell things online, Zac tells us with excitement. Which of these fine professions(?) is Zac’s passion, you ask? None of the above! Zac promotes parties and DJs, along with his buddies who all look like they work at a tattoo shop on a beach boardwalk.
Zac tells us that all you need to be a successful DJ is “a laptop, some talent, and one track.” Now, I know next to nothing about DJs but I’m pretty sure you need more than one track, unless that one track is “Dancing on my Own” by Robyn. I’m also pretty sure I hate DJs but think I could bond with them over disdain for this movie.

Hype from his friends leads us to believe that Cole (Zac Efron) (of fucking course that’s his name)(I will refer to him only as Zac) is a cool and hot DJ, but then it cuts to him working a party with an empty dance floor. A tipsy girl come to Zac and requests “Drunk in Love,” a Beyonce classic off her eponymous album, featuring Jay-Z, which everyone knows is a certified bop. “Absolutely not,” Zac tells her, because he hates fun and music. The worst part of this moment is that the Catfish Max obviously thinks it will get us on Zac’s side, because girls are stupid and their tastes are dumb??
Now Zac and his friends are moodily staring at the Los Angeles skyline, when another friend walks up to them, full of purpose, and says out of nowhere, “I just read about the guy who invented instagram. He sold it for $400 million. He was 26 years old.” Again, this movie is about DJs, but sure I guess it can also be about silicon valley wunderkins.
“You guys wanna make real money, or you wanna live and die in the valley?” one friend asks. I can only assume “the valley” is the point in your acting career where you make this movie.
Cut to a scene at a rooftop party. Zac is the DJ and Emily Ratajkowski is there, wearing a romper from tobi.com. She tells Zac that this party is a little stiff, which is probably code for “please play ‘Drunk in Love.’” Zac asks “Should I amp it up,” but literally his only job is to know when to amp it up.


Now Zac is explaining to us some nonsense about beats per minute, acting like this is a science. There are dumb graphics that show an x-ray of Emily Ratajkowski’s heart beat, to demonstrate….???? Someone tell this kid it’s not that deep. If it’s actually a good party, everyone is drunk enough that they’ll just dance to “Low” by Flo Rida.
Apparently 128 beats per minute is the “magic number” although no one explains what happens when we get there so I can only assume that is the speed at which this movie self-combusts, because that would be magic. A slightly older mentor type sees Zac’s “talent” and takes him under his wing, but things aren’t all sunshine and rainbows. There are a bunch of shots of Zac and his friends sadly drinking beer next to their drained pool. You know what else is drained? Any positive feelings I had toward Zac Efron, which were already limited to a time I watched High School Musical stoned.

It’s still unclear whether Zac actually makes music or just has Spotify on his laptop. But his mentor gives him a corny speech about paying attention to the real world and creating new sounds. Cole thinks this means he should record the sound of a staple gun and put it in a song.
There are dramatic shots of people yelling “it’s never gonna happen!” and throwing money in a box and questioning each other’s loyalty. There’s a fight in the pool and a half second shot of a funeral. I look up the plot because I need to know who died. It was a human named Squirrel who overdosed.
There is another vague montage with clips of a man throwing his jacket and Emily Ratajkowski dancing. In a voice over, Zac says the following:
“If you have a dream, and it’s made of everything that’s made you — hardship, friendship, so much love — that’s your ticket to everything.”
Is that…a sentence?? What is that supposed to be or even mean??
The last shot is Zac Efron standing on a stage in front of a massive crowd. “What’s up, I’m Cole Carter.” That’s it. It’s supposed to land a punch but I just wanna land a punch on his face. Of COURSE they named him Cole Carter like they probably had the name and wrote a whole script around it. They also could have named him Skyler, Dylan, or Chase.
If you think I’m insane for hating this movie so much I’m not!! It had one of the worst opening weekends for its category. It is surpassed only by Jem and the Hologram and Rock the Kasbah.
Anyway, here is the only good clip from the TV show Catfish.
