AMFAD ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD (2024)

3 stars
101 Films. Digital. Out Now

Here’s a film that thinks it is so modern – after all it has a hashtag in the title – but is really just the same old same old…

Like so many recent outings, this features the newest “phenomenon” of the influencer amongst the characters. Sarah (Jade Pettyjohn) is heading to a music festival Karmapalooza. She has been invited to tag along with a close knit group of friends who are now in college together – so we have Mona (Jennifer Ens), who is an Instagram star (course she is), Liv (Ali Fumiko Whitney) who desperately wants to follow in Mona’s footsteps (why?), L.B. (Julian Haig), who live streams (because you can), slacker Will (Justin Derickson) and not forgetting Guy (Jack Doupe-Smith), who is mainly interested in getting high. Good thing they also know Aaron (Cardi Wong), who plans on meeting them later and has a crush on Sarah – as he works in a pharmacy and can steal some drugs! Of course we are introduced to the cast via messaging which pops up on screen. So very up to date (or annoying, depending on your view).

On the way there, the van they are travelling in has a blow out and no spare tire. As luck and contrived plotlines would have it Sarah manages to snag an Airbnb rental nearby and a helpful cop ferries them there.

We know from the introduction to the story that the music festival has a dark history – where seven attendees were killed by what the press at the time called the SDSK, or Seven Deadly Sins Killer, due to how the corpses were left. Our bunch of what we know will ultimately be kill fodder also have something in their pasts which they have tried to ignore – the seeming suicide of their friend Colette (played by social media star Jojo Siwa, probably the best known of all the cast but honestly wasted here in flashbacks. Despite being a old git, even I know who she is). However, there is clearly more to this previous incident than they are letting on.

So, as they settle in to their rather large house… guess what, there is a killer on the loose, who starts killing them off. Could it be the SDSK killer back and murdering again? As I said at the start of this review, nothing really new to see here!

The cast are a bunch of unlikeable, vacuous characters and whilst this has a couple of good plot twists and suitably gory killings it doesn’t really hang together. The script by Josh Sims and Jessica Sarah Flaum (from a story by producer John Baldecchi) is a by the numbers affair, and with some of the deaths echoing SAW, it comes as no surprise that director Marcus Dunstan worked as writer on several of the sequels.

Steve Kirkham