Director: Marcus Dunstan
Year: 2024
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
On the verge of a major music festival, a group of friends get together to travel there only to get stranded along the way and are forced to stay at a house until it’s repaired, but as they spend the time fixing their social media games are unaware a masked killer is hunting them one by one.
Review:
Overall, this was a decent if somewhat troubling modern slasher effort. Among the better features here is the film’s strong attempts at managing a fun connection between the group and the Seven Deadly Sins. The concept itself is handled well enough with the initial massacre taking place decades earlier and featuring the earlier girl as a previous target that turns the new group into equally-obvious victims involving her as a source of the rampage based on how they drove her to kill herself featuring enough interplay with the group to make everything known as they wait around. That this leads into a solid series of brutal and graphic death scenes featuring the torture-porn aesthetic of the trapped victim forced into a specific situation that ties their chosen sin into a streaming experience that includes a gruesome death at the end. With the setup taking place in the lighted dungeon using tricks to complete the connection with Deadly Sins and making everything come together quite clearly, there's a lot to like here in some regards.
There are some really hard problems to overcome with this one. The main stumbling block is the most obvious and egregious one in the utterly annoying and aggravating characters that we’re forced to follow throughout the running time. This one again decides to follow the trend of modern slasher or genre films going with characters utterly obsessed with being social media famous which means everything they do is dependent on how many likes or follows it will get them, spend the entirety of the running time glued to their phones, or complaining about anything not going their way even if there’s nothing that can be done about it. Given that we’re introduced to them on their phones getting away from a prank gone wrong, concerned with making sure their clothing is perfect, or furiously texting the others trying to make sure they get likes on their posts, it never gets better after dropping them onto us as massively irritating teens that keeps going throughout the film. It never gets better and keeps this one from truly getting any kind of genuine sympathy for the group.
The other factor here is the generally lackluster and somewhat underwhelming pace that takes forever to get going. The group spends a large section of time continuing their inane social media uplinks or other personal indiscretions mentioned above that it feels far longer than it should with the slashing starting at around the hour mark. This could've been far more expedient to get to the killing with everything going on but the focus on displaying the group of moronic and irritating social media-obsessed figures that are far stupider than they appear leaving it open for one of the more infuriating and just terrible endings in the genre where it continues on far past it’s usefulness to feel like overkill. Planting everything up the way it does with the kind of piling on plot points that aren’t necessary simply to pull off a lame twist and setup for a sequel that won’t be that interesting causes this to be even more problematic, and in general leaves this one with a lot of flaws.
Overview: */5
An immensely troubling slasher without much to like, there are a lot of issues to this one that bring it down from what it could’ve been as it remains quite heavily impacted by these issues. Those who are fine with these factors or are curious about it will have the most to like here while most everyone else should heed caution.
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