Killer Party

A fairly bottom-of-the-barrel slasher, Killer Party follows three college friends as they’re forced to submit to a hazing ritual while pledging a popular sorority – with the movie’s first hour devoted almost entirely to the characters’ pointless, tedious exploits in and around their school. Filmmaker William Fruet and scripter Barney Cohen deliver a narrative that seems to have been expanded from a 20 minute short, as the title occurrence is preceded by a slapdash storyline revolving around wafer-thin protagonists and their completely uninteresting shenanigans. This paves the way for an episodic opening hour that emphasizes tiresome pranks and dull encounters, with Fruet’s screenplay introducing an assortment of male figures that seem to serve no purpose other than to torment and bother the supposed heroes. (There’s a hint of a possible romance between two disparate figures but it’s quickly abandoned.) It’s a completely sloppy atmosphere that grows more and more interminable as time slowly progresses, with the entirely uninvolving feel compounded by a distressing (and almost total) lack of gore (ie the kills, surely the highlight in something like this, generally transpire offscreen). By the time the actual horror stuff finally rolls around – the majority of which is far too silly and Exorcist-like to make a positive impact – Killer Party has certainly cemented its place as a thoroughly misbegotten disaster that’s best forgotten.

1/2* out of ****