FrightFest review – Appofeniacs
Early in writer-director Chris Marrs Piliero’s Appofeniacs, a woman is killed by her very angry boyfriend – who has seen a video clip online of her having sex with someone else – and the killer then bleats furiously ‘it’s not my fault’ over and over, and he’ll continue to whine and try to enlist pity even after the butterfly effect of this incident (a video deepfake) has resulted in more deaths, maimings and horrors.
The question of who’s fault it really is seems to be answered when we’re introduced to the deepfaker, sketchy app developer Duke (Aaron Holliday), who is trying to pitch his innovation as a moneymaker to a calm, serious, possibly dangerous investor (Jermaine Fowler). Meanwhile, he has impulsively acted on petty grudges, whims and irritations to put more deepfakes out into the world – a guy (Massi Pregini) ragging on a friend’s girlfriend (Simran Jehani), a cosplay costumier (Sean Gunn) claiming not to trust banks and have a pile of cash stashed in his house, a store clerk (Paige Searcy) giving vent to a racist rant in an apartment stairwell. The film leaps back and forth in time, showing how all these people – a small knot with multiple interconnections – are affected by Duke’s horrifyingly casual, trivial menace … leading to a couple of actual massacres, some bad scenes which turn appallingly worse, and moments of extreme gore which suggest that the payoff for making shit up is always real blood spilled on the floor.
The costumier’s authentic manga weaponry comes in handy for one situation, though Piliero doesn’t just carve off limbs and spill guts, punctuating the film with bursts of Tarantino-ish in-group chat (one girl’s significant fave film is Django Unchained, which she’s just snagged ‘on physical’ and effectively ramping up black humorous suspense in a swinger hot tub party with such a bad vibe that no one can have a good time and an unsettling, slide-into-nightmare evening as the girl framed as a racist becomes ever more paranoid as she has minor encounters with a series of innocent black people. Piliero is sparing in his use of familiar faces – Gunn is the highest-profile cast member – but gets great work from young performers who are likely to snag higher-profile gigs, with particularly strong work from Holliday (from Cocaine Bear), Will Brandt (as electric car Uber driver Texas Tim, an actual innocent party who gets in way too deep) and Searcy (who goes deep into the neuroses of an indiefilm pixie and shows something like final girl chops).
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