I selected three that sounded like horror comedies from my watchlists, but did any of them deliver the kind of fun I was hoping for? Let’s find out.
MOVIE THEATER MASSACRE (2023)
I love when slashers take place in a movie theater. I love when movies only run 72 minutes long. I love horror comedies. So…what went wrong here?
There is just no energy. We spend a majority of the movie at a theater (filmed in an actual, fantastic movie theater), watching the staff toss around movie trivia and complain that nobody goes to theaters anymore as they count down the days until the theater closes for good. The actors all seem bored in their attempts to act natural, and I guess the most obvious hint of humor is when one of the ushers notices someone jerking off in one of the bathroom stalls.
About once every 30 minutes, someone is murdered in the back parking lot, with no suspense, jump scares, or intense violence to liven things up. So that’s about 3 victims throughout the course of most of the movie.
Linnea Quigley is called in as a psychic to do a séance that goes nowhere, the girl working the ticket booth gets held up at gunpoint, and the crew kills time by making their own little movie at one point.
That’s all that’s really going on here until suddenly there’s a rush of people coming to the theater in the final act.
This leads to a sudden jolt of action, with the masked killer stabbing and shooting theatergoers as they stampede out of the theater Then…I think some supernatural force drags the killer out of the theater and up into the sky to put an end to the killings.
What the hell did I just watch?
GIRL IN THE REFRIGERATOR (2025)
This is like the Cougar Town of dark horror comedies, with a bunch of friends just hanging around drinking and talking the whole time. Difference is, most of these friends don’t know there is a dead body stashed in the main guy’s fridge.
I guess the goal was to make the beefy main guy seem geeky and unassuming, but his sleazeball haircut and exaggerated glasses make him look more like a creepy pedo, so it’s kind of hard to believe that he has a girlfriend and that a pretty neighbor is interested in him.
See, the main guy wants to break up with his girlfriend, but he decides to at least bang her one more time. Unfortunately, he kind of drills her right into a deadly power tool.
Rather than face the consequences of what he’s done, he decides to store the body for later disposal. He researches the best way to do it, and I guess we finally learn what the purpose is of AI, because it suggests that the smartest thing to do is keep the body in a refrigerator.
He does just that then goes on with his day. The tone is quite quirky and humorous, with plenty to give you a giggle as different characters pop in and out to chill and have some beers in the apartment complex.
The problem is, the movie kind of forgets there’s a body in the fridge and that this is a horror comedy. We get flashbacks of how annoying the girlfriend was and why the main guy might have wanted to dump her (and her body), his daydreams about how things will unfold with the law if he’s busted. Meanwhile, people that drop by keep getting close to discovering the body, which means they must die. Unfortunately, we never get to see him kill them!
Instead, the focus is on his budding relationship with his pretty neighbor, which shifts this into romance mode. So far into romance mode that the romance even starts getting the black and white, silent film treatment.
Eh. Really just not my thing. Plus, you kind of sense right from the start where the relationship between him and his new love interest is going to end up.
MASSACRE AT FEMUR CREEK (2024)
Of these three “horror comedies”, this one worked the most for me simply because it has the worn out look of a VHS tape of a backwoods horror flick. In terms of what the film was going for, the script is not disciplined enough to grab you with any clear concise plot.
While most of this is played for laughs, there’s an aspect that seems completely overlooked and underutilized that could have made the film effectively creepy. For the first few kills, the killer, who is wearing one of those transparent masks, simply limps slowly up behind a person standing on the side of an isolated road at night and kills them.
It virtually rubber stamps the killer’s trademark approach, but that is never really explored again. At least the kills after that are gory with practical effects.
Our main group is a bunch of guys camping in the woods for a bachelor party. Rather than kill them off, for an entire hour the killer just comes upon random people that are in the woods for a variety of reasons. The cleverest moment has a small group of indie filmmakers shooting a backwoods horror movie and not realizing that the killer has unintentionally stepped into the role of their killer.
We also get a female stripper who is hired to come to their camp for a performance and gets more character development than most of the main guys.
Just before the one-hour mark, the killer wanders up to their campfire and starts killing them. Like, these guys had no idea there was a killer in the woods for most of the movie, which affected their own importance to the plot if you ask me.
The whole final act, between the kills and the main characters fighting back, is anticlimactic, but a dick does get blown off with a gun, which is always fun.
After that, there’s a very boring final scene focusing on the day of the wedding, but it does end with a cheesy, old school final frame.
