#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead

The movie was well acted by a pretty decent ensemble cast, but the writing made every character extremely unlikable and took away any regret the viewer might have at their demises.

The viewer ends up asking themselves a question from scene one...are college aged people really that shallow, mean, self-centered and dumb as these characters??? They are clueless in every step of the movie and of course break every rule of the "Surviving a horror movie" rulebook. Situations which normal intelligent people would be wary of; they jump into without any bit of caution!

The LGBT underlying theme is somewhat of a surprise, but it also paints a pretty negative picture of same-sex people, in fact this film paints a bad picture of LOTS of people, young people are flakey and unintelligent, guys are all horndogs, girls are addicted to social media exploitation and are constantly looking for a sexual hook-up even if they dislike the partner!. It also leaves a VERY strong negative impression of the police!

Wow! Talk about insulting every group of people equally!!!!

Not too shabby. Adding energy to the generic formula while being little more than an ode to 80's horror. What makes it work though is the energy picking up in the second to latter half of the film, some hilarious kills coupled with the type of characters you can't help but hope will meet a grisly end and a conclusion that's surprisingly effective. Predictable? Yes. But it's elevated by a team both in front of and behind the camera that genuinely put in the work and with an ending leaving room for a sequel, I actually wouldn't mind another go around to see what else they have up their sleeves..

Horror films, as a genre, have always cannibalized one another. It's a fairly rare thing to see an actual new idea in horror. When a new idea does come about, the film makes a mark.. and is then copied repeatedly. This film is NOT one of those unique horror films.

If you've ever wanted to explain how horror films cannibalize each other, this film is a PERFECT example of creating a horror film without one single unique idea and just using a collection of stolen plots and motivations from OTHER films strung together.

This film starts with 10 minutes of just random back story to try and set up some history - using a concept taken from the movie "Seven".

Then it goes on to a typical young adult road trip ultimately ending up in a "Cabin in the Woods".

It's a very odd choice to put the title sequence here..... 20 minutes into the film.....

Then the story continues a la "I Know What you Did Last Summer" in addition to borrowing heavily from the "Saw" and "Scream" franchise.

.... a callback to "Seven" (Or perhaps "The Collector")... and then "Scream" again.... and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" Again...

Acting was a mix of terrible to passable. But as a story it was just a bad copy of every popular horror concept from the past.

------- Pass -------------

I really had alot of fun watching this one. I will say I didn't have it figured out at all. They do a good job keeping the killers identity a secret until the end with a nice revelation scene.

This was heavily publicized for being Jo Jo Siwas first horror and slasher movie, but yet they cast her as a character in flashback scenes. Just didn't get that part.

Overall I absolutely loved the gory kills and it was a blast watching how the seven deadly sins were recreated for each of the kids brutal deaths. It was fun watching most of these intolerable characters scrambling to survive while being picked off one by one.

The ending was a little underwhelming being that the killer's motive ended up not being totally justified.

Fun watch though and is available on amazon prime with the screambox subscription. I'm giving this one a 2nd watch, one of my favorites I've seen in theaters this year!

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.

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.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.