Karma’s a bitch. JoJo Siwa warned us all earlier this summer, and so the timing of her latest film (and the first that isn’t tween-appealing pap by design) in some ways couldn’t have been more fortuitous (not that the movie’s non-existent marketing took advantage of that softball). The redundantly titled #AMFAD All My Friends Are Dead — a hundred bucks says a Gen-Xer came up with that one — is a bit of I Know What You Did Last Summer recycled pulp that finds a group of college friends AirBnBing it in anticipation of a music festival only to be set upon by a black-cloaked assailant donning a digital interface mask that frequently flashes images of Siwa’s late Colette. Sarah (Jade Pettyjohn) is relatively new to the group, and so across the film seeks answers about who exactly this Colette is and what blame her friends bear in all the murdering going on (smartly relegating 2024’s cringiest person to the silent flashback sidelines). #AMFAD also establishes in an opening montage that said music festival is only just now resurrecting after previously being closed due to a serial killer slaughtering a houseful of attendees, themed to the seven deadly sins (a thread the film mostly ignores, and only exists to establish the conceptual nature of the killing contained therein).
Directed by Marcus Dunston, best known for his The Collector/The Collection duology from the post-Saw heyday of late-aughts torture porn ventures, #AMFAD indeed borrows not just from the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise, but likewise from Saw with its manner of executions and even Scream in its most ill-advised bit of cribbing — on top of it’s lazy meta noodling and framework of friends deducing who among them is deranged, the killer’s image pretty clearly aspires to a digital-era version of Ghostface. But derivation in and of itself isn’t necessarily a fatal flaw, or even a real concern if an artist properly osmotes influence and proves adept at either manipulating or enriching it. Dunston has no such ambition, instead merely drowning his film in references and tropes. And no character has any depth beyond their established type: of the three women, there’s the manipulative, attention-drenched influencer, the coattails-clinger wannabe, and the innocent nice girl; the four men, then, are the soy boy beta, the walking erection, the party boy who goes full Hungry Hungry Hippo on any pill in sight, and the sigma’s loyal right-hand man, replete with bucket hat. In other words, it’s impossible not to root for demise across the board.
Okay, so any real horror substance is off the table, but what about style? Look elsewhere. Dunston’s penchant for indulging viscera remains present, but there’s simply no slickness or novelty to the kills — we’re well past the days where the image of entrails sliding out an unlikable victim’s cut gut engenders much beyond unintended chuckles. What is present, however, are frames and frames worth of the cheapest CGI blood you’ve seen in a minute, abysmal to the point that were it not for the actors marking this film’s moment in history, it would be impossible to believe this was made in 2023. And Dunston seems content to rely on the AirBnB’s onslaught of neon lighting as a substitute for genuine aesthetic design or visual character. Perhaps the cherry on this steaming pile, though, comes when the ultimate baddie is revealed and po-faced announces the motivation to be: “hurt people hurt people.” There’s a world where one imagines this is a winking commentary by Dunston, a grue- and gore-centric director, on the elevated horror that has so infected the genre, but that’s an utterly unearned read given the artistically and intellectually bankrupt remainder of the film. And #AMFAD follows this moment with a shrug of twist on the final girl formula that is more of a three-degree rotation. As Dunston follows these final moments with literal minutes of credit inserts that extend into the aftermath of the film’s events, even having the temerity to suggest a potential sequel, we realize that perhaps it wasn’t JoJo’s words we should have heeded, but instead Lil Uzi Vert’s: “All my friends are dead / push me to the edge.”
DIRECTOR: Marcus Dunstan; CAST: Jade Pettyjohn, JoJo Siwa, Justin Dickerson, Jennifer Ens; DISTRIBUTOR: Cineverse; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: August 2; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 31 min.
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