Studio 666

Directed by B. J. McDonnell, Studio 666 follows the Foo Fighters, including Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, and Pat Smear, as they experience a series of increasingly spooky happenings at the remote mansion they’ve rented to record an album. There’s little doubt, ultimately, that Studio 666 fares best in its promising, briskly-paced opening stretch, as the movie, which boasts a theme composed by Daniel Davies and John Carpenter, benefits from its attention-grabbing pre-credits sequence and a general emphasis on the easygoing antics of its likeable stars – with, in terms of the latter, the uniform absence of acting ability among the Foo Fighters’ members initially not as problematic as one might’ve feared. (The musicians’ stiff, one-note performances eventually do contribute heavily to the increasingly tiresome atmosphere, however.) The movie’s shift from watchable to interminable, then, is triggered by an uneventful and aggressively meandering midsection that spins its wheels to an often astonishing degree, and although McDonnell has peppered the proceedings with a few appreciatively over-the-top kill sequences, Studio 666 builds towards an absolutely endless final third that ensures it concludes on a seriously forgettable and anticlimactic note – with the final result a vanity project that would hardly have worked as a short music video (let alone a 106 minute (!) feature).

* out of ****