Director: Katherine Barrell, Melanie Scrofano
Year: 2024
Country: Canada
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Torture Slasher
Plot:
Called out to a remote mansion, a pair of influencers arrive to find other influencers at the house on the same mission where they find themselves competing against each other in a series of dangerous games for their hosts where the losers are killed off, forcing them to get away alive.
Review:
This was a much better feature than expected. One of the finer points of this one is the fun way this goes about subverting the expectations of everyone during the game. The fact that everyone tends to play by rather obvious influencer personalities and tropes with the self-help guru, fitness freak, make-up guide, positivity promoter, money maker, and the kid with a stage mom all come together with it seemingly being obvious who they’re going to be and what type of personalities they all have. Instead of going with the obvious, there’s some fun to be had with the different ways the group shows off how different they really are with the way they go about changing up the formula involving the group coming together to help each other in between the games and making sure they stay involved in the process, coming together as the rounds get tougher and more vicious.
That gives the games they play throughout here a lot of fun integrating games with deadly consequences. Operating on the idea that they have to lay bare their soul even if it doesn’t equate to their cultivated image beforehand makes this one feature some ingenious challenges including filming videos about their true self or trying to create a viral sales pitch under the guidelines imposed upon them at the last minute with gruesome implications for failure, it makes for a fun touch here to see how this plays out here. As the games continue and the idea of fighting back starts to impact how it’s played, this one gets some intriguing twists and revelations out to help make the games even more impactful as the manipulation to figure out what’s going on at the house. With some decent enough gore in the games, these are enough to give this one some positive points.
There are a few issues with this one that hold it down. Among its biggest drawbacks is the weird decision to unveil the mastermind and the plot behind everything at the mid-way point in the film, only to continue the games anyway. There’s little reason why this one would go about introducing a storyline where they figure out the secret villains in such a manner as they do where it comes together logically yet still seemingly accidentally blurting out everything yet then putting the pieces together later on while then going on with the games anyway. Hence, this feels like a highly contrived setup. The other issue here is an equal amount of flimsy knowledge about who these people are, using just these bare outlines of plot points and character development about the world they’re involved in which makes for a lot of guesswork to help figure things out. These all bring this one down overall.
Overview: ***/5
A solid enough if problematic genre effort, there are some likable factors here to make this one more enjoyable than it should although there are some big issues here that hold it down. Give it a shot if you're a fan of these types of genre efforts or are curious about it while most others out there should heed caution with this one.
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