The Red Circle

The above picture pretty accurately sums up how I felt after watching this film.

Murder Party was heralded as a brilliant low-budget horror movie, steeped in genre history. It seems more like the genre stepped in something. the story hinges around Chris, a very lonely and boring traffic policeman, trying to enjoy Halloween in spite of his situation. So, when he comes across a stray, black envelope inviting him to a “Murder Party,” Chris goes home, juryrigs a costume out of a cardboard box, bakes a pumpkin loaf, and attempt to enjoy himself. At a house that is miles away from where he lives. With people he doesn’t know.

So its much to his consternation (or, actually not – Chris barely reacts to anything going on around him) that the partygoers have a plan to murder the guest that shows up. They’re a bunch of art students, you see. And their endgame is to turn the act of human sacrifice into an art exhibition to impress a shady art dealer who has promised the “winner” of the group a sizeable grant.

Well, at least that’s what I think happens. You see, this movie has no time for things like continuity with a plot this complicated (read: not). No one ever really competes for the prize, and the grant issue isn’t even really brought up until it fills a need for a useless reveal/subplot. Not to mention how most of the running time is spent letting completely unlikeable, whiny, self-obsessed art students talk about the most trivial things. I will give the flick points for accuracy, but it’s still not something you’d expect to see in a horror film. Especially sine the film is seemingly not attempting to ridicule the stuck up art world and is instead content with allowing these idiots to fanwank themselves for 30 minutes at a time.

It’s depressing. You can tell from the movie’s premise that the creators had something interesting to say. The idea of a literal murder party is pretty inspired. Plus the ideas of obvious trust-fund kids wanting to commit murder for the sake of art (actually money, passed off as art) is appealing. So why is this movie so relentlessly terrible?

Simply put, its because the people involved are relentlessly talentless. The cast is uniformly awful, playing smug when smarmy is appropriate. Hell, the actor cast in the lead spends most of the film with a gag in his mouth because he wasn’t a good actor. The dialogue doesn’t help their case either. It plays out like a badly written Kevin Smith movie with its head even further up its own ass. The editing falls totally flat. There are many times in the film attempts to use a smash cut to elicit laughter. Not a single one of them works, as the scene before it is played too long, too short, or too obvious. The direction seems to consist of simply telling the actors where to stand (and often in visually unappealing tableaus) and to say words. It appears that subtleties in performance, or visual storytelling were glossed over, or more likely, flat out ignored. The only success is the cinematography, and this is simply because the steadicam operator didn’t have parkinson’s. The shots are flat and boring, but at least they’re consistently non jittery.

I am aware that this film was an extremely low budget release. It went to production without any funds set aside, in fact. And with that in mind, the effects are admirable. They’re few and far between for a reason, and none will stick with you any longer than the running time. It’s just a sad sight (and one far too common in today’s genre filmmaking) that a group of people that wanted to make a horror film so badly were able to miss the mark so broadly.

It seems very much like I am picking on a small movie about people at a party who want to kill someone for art for not having any artistic merit. And I am. But please let me qualify my hatred. There are many, many, terrible films that I unabashedly love. And the reason is simple. They know they’re complete trash, and the effort is put into making the audience go along with that trash from the opening. Transporter 2 does not attempt to address issues that affect anyone. It is simply there to put a foot chart on your face and learn the Jitterbug. Even flicks like Andy and Luke Campbell’s almost brutishly bad Demon Summer boil down to a group of friends that are obviously having a great time shooting a crap horror movie and to hell with you if you’re not along for the ride. Murder Party is like showing up to a LAN party and having everyone gregariously talking about how to harvest figs. They’re having a grand old time, but why the hell did  you get an invite?

Murder Party, in the end, brings up some very interesting ideas to the table. The idea of the privileged becoming savages for unsavory reasons. The conflict of dealing with people who want to kill you for no reason (but instead just tie you up and talk about themselves for 5 hours), the complete fakeness of people, and wha reality exists underneath. The idea of the act being the art. All of these concepts are introduced within the running time of the film, and none of them are given any discussion beyond the sentence or scene they are mentioned.

One of these days, I hope I will get a chance to champion a low budget, independent, innovative, and effective horror movie. I just hope I don’t have to suffer through many more movies like Murder Party in order to get there.

4.5 out of 10

Note: 1.5 of these points come from killing the biggest hippie in the film with non-organic food.

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