Director: Charles Lightbody
Year: 2026
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural; Horror/Comedy
Plot:
Heading out for a gig, a popular cover band stays at a local cabin in the woods when they arrive on the wrong day and pass the time by playing karaoke, igniting a curse from a possessed karaoke machine to sing a song or die gruesomely, forcing them to solve its mystery to get away.
Review:
For the most part, this was a massively likable and enjoyable genre effort. One of the better features here is the straight-up silly idea presented here that manages to become a bit more serious than expected as this goes along. The starting point, with the group heading out on a tour and finding themselves stuck in the cabin for a while as they prepare for their latest gig, which only becomes a chance for them to get further into their secret vices and relationships with each other as they stay there before finding the special karaoke device, makes for a great way to introduce the curse they fall under. As it becomes obvious that the special karaoke device is forcing them to sing and perform a chosen song or face the consequences it prepares for them if they perform at an inadequate standard, there’s a growing feeling of hopelessness and despair that emerges over being forced to go through karaoke performances to save their lives, with special conditions that will help keep them alive.
That all means that the series of karaoke performances that they are forced to play offer the kind of goofy, silly, and inherently cheesy concepts while still maintaining the kind of naturally dark and ominous feeling behind them. The first few instances, where the series of graphic outcomes featured here are based on a specific line in the song they’ve chosen to sing, gives this a great gimmick to carry the later situations where it keeps recurring, letting the sequences come together with the kind of immensely cheesy and silly setpieces where the victims have their head explode, melt down into a puddle of goo, or just burst into a mess of blood and inner organs strewn around the around. There’s a massively enjoyable sense of comedic timing with what’s going on, and it helps to make everything that much more fun to hold it up overall.
There aren’t too many factors here that hold it down, but it does have some issues. The major issue with this one is the silly reasoning and motivation for what’s going on, turning everything into the kind of performative venture that would’ve been quite easy to figure out the rules of what’s going on. It takes way too long to get going with uncovering the purpose of the mysterious karaoke machine and forcing them to sing songs, and even longer to uncover the true nature of everything that is taking place within the cabin with what the machine wants it to do, only because its introduction of one of the main characters who knows the truth takes place with only minutes to spare. That means the entire purpose of the night is quite uninvolving in how simplistic the whole thing could’ve been avoided by sheer dumb luck and not taken anything from anyone, lowering the whole fear of the object considerably. That’s a small problem to overcome here, and it's what brings this down the most.
Overview: ****/5
An immensely impressive genre comedy, there’s a lot to like with this one, and it manages to keep it going well enough that its few slight issues don’t matter much compared to its worthwhile factors. Those with an interest in the style or approach, or who are curious about it, will have a lot to like here, while those turned off by its drawbacks will want to heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment