It’s a trio of flicks in which influencers gather together in an isolated house to party, only to be targeted by masked killers.
#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead (2024)
This simple, mean-spirited slasher comes from the director of The Collector movies. The cast of characters is despicable and the kills are brutal…in other words, sometimes murder is so satisfying.
A group of seven influencer friends rents an AirBnB to go to a music festival that was the site of unsolved murders several years before.
As this obnoxious, self-centered group begins to party, we get snippets of backstory about a friend they lost to an apparent suicide, played in a brief cameo by JoJo Siwa.
Slowly but surely, the friends begin disappearing, and each one is taken to be tortured and killed in a lair lit in dance club colors by a killer in a hoodie and an electronic mask that can display different images on the surface. Talk about rave to the grave.
The kills are brutal and gory, which is really what you have to run with here, and while I’m always up for death by dildo, it’s a very random weapon of choice in this particular film.
There’s not much in the way of scares or tension, although there are a few suspenseful moments that give us more than just the victims being captured and killed.
One of the most important elements to mention here is that there is a lesbian side story that at first seems to get buried rather quickly, but it does take on a much larger role late in the film as the group begins to learn the truth of why they are being targeted.
The final chaotic chase scene and battle to the death gets quite over-the-top with some funny moments as well, and there are plenty of twists that run straight through the end credits, so make sure to keep watching.
AMP HOUSE MASSACRE (2024)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A group of the biggest, most obnoxious internet stars gets trapped in a house with a masked killer. Yeah. It’s a sign of the times that we’ve been bombarded by influencer horror over the last few years.
The film begins with one member of this clique dying at one of their parties. In honor of his memory, the others decide to gather in a large house and initiate a new, up-and-coming influencer into their group to fill the void.
Soon, the killing begins. Would you believe the killer wears a hoodie and an electronic mask that changes images?
However, this film differs from AMFAD in that the killer begins taunting the group to get them to turn against each other. The tension it causes is the highlight here, because the death scenes are pretty tame.
The kills come fast in the last half hour, and of course there’s a few twists along the way as the truth unfolds as to how their first friend died and who is now seeking revenge.
FOLLOWERS (2024)
This is actually a sequel to a film called Follower, which I haven’t seen. You don’t actually have to, because the movie, which only ran a little over an hour long, is recapped in the first fifteen minutes of the sequel. The first one looks like a bland movie in which three influencers go camping in the wilderness, get terrorized by a guy in a mask…and then all get away at the end! Yawn.
In this movie, which is essentially an hour long without the recap, it’s more than a year later. One of the girls has decided to get back into her influencer career by exploiting what they went through.
She invites the other two girls and their boyfriends for a New Year’s Eve gathering in a mansion in the middle of nowhere. That lands this one on the holiday horror page, but don’t expect any signs or celebration of the holiday at all.
This is a pretty simple and straightforward home invasion film about internet fame and angry white male incels jealous of not being the center of society’s attention anymore. This cultish group of guys who fancy themselves to be wolves, wearing furry masks and even growling when they go hunting victims, decides to crash the party and kill off the influencers and their boyfriends.
The action that unfolds is totally typical, the weapon of choice is most often a gun (yawn), and the twist is predictable. But I’ll give the film credit for feeling like a high-quality production rather than a low budget indie.
