[Review] Pour Yourself a Nice, Tall Glass of Vicious Fun

After horror movie fanatic Joel (Evan Marsh) drunkenly passes out in a storage room in the back of a bar, he awakes to find a support group in the middle of a meeting. Thinking it’s a meeting for addicts, he plays along after they mistake him for someone else. He soon realizes that he bit off more than he can chew when he realizes that it’s a meeting for serial killers and he’s about to be thrown into the middle of a plot that he could only imagine in the movies.

Riding the recent wave of stories set in the 80s, complete with a dope new wave techno soundtrack, comes Vicious Fun. Directed by Cody Calahan and written by Calahan and James Villeneuve, Vicious Fun plays the meta card from its surface to its core without making it too predictable for the audience. 

Evan Marsh (Joel) in Vicious Fun

Our lead is a mix of the relatable horror fan and the insufferable horror fan. He runs/writes for a horror zine called Vicious Fanatics and he awkwardly calls out the horror director he interviews about how he constantly uses slow-moving, stalking killers (“...again.”) and he knocks the show that his roommate (Alexa Rose Steele) wants to watch with her friend. He would rather spend the night in and rent a Beta machine to watch a horror movie while wearing a shirt featuring the zine that he writes for on it. 

Our ensemble of serial killers features Zachary (David Koechner), Hideo (Sean Baek), Bob (Ari Millen), Fritz (Jullian Richings), Mike (Robert Maillet), and Carrie (Amber Goldfarb). The audience gets to spend the most time with the latter four. Once the story kicks into gear, it feels like you throw Patrick Bateman, Herbert West, Jason Voorhees, Hannibal Lecter, and Furiousa thrown into a blender and then set the blender to “campy”. I haven’t seen three serial killers put together and act like the Three Stooges since the Hell On Earth 2006 episode of South Park. The cast may not be big in numbers, but the brilliant character acting stresses the camp and the core of the story, from the psychotic side to the heartfelt side. 

Ari Millen (Bob) and Evan Marsh (Joel) in Vicious Fun

The kills and gore effects could have been elevated only by red and blue tints of 3D glasses circa Friday the 13th Part 3. I won’t say who but someone gets a giant syringe stuck into their eye and the practical effects turn towards the camera and it screams of the era they’re paying homage to. 

Here’s something you’ll learn about me when I do reviews- when I say something is a “solid 3 out of 5”, that’s one of the best compliments I could give because that’s my solid recommendation. If I watch a movie and I’d tell you to “wait for video” then it’s mediocre.

But for Vicious Fun, get your pizza, get your snacks, get your pop or drink of choice, and get ready for a night of (here it comes, dad joke incoming) vicious fun. The twists happen early and often, so be ready to get sucked in even further. 

And, seriously, if this score shows up on streaming or is available for purchase online, then help me out and let me know. It’s so good. 

Vicious Fun is now streaming on Shudder