FrightFest review – Night of Violence (2025)

FrightFest review – Night of Violence (2025)

A pharma company has just achieved a court victory in a class action lawsuit brought against them after a drugs trial in a small town has gone disastrously wrong.  Crass exec Blake (Russ Russo) opts to throw a party in the firm’s offices to celebrate – an early sign either of the all-encompassing rottenness of the firm or the low budget of the film is that the party is done on the hilarious cheap.  Disguised as catering staff – and wearing vigilante mask – a small group of armed vigilantes invade the building, seal it off and set out to torment and chop up all the tipsy employees.  Slightly-conscience-stricken Eliott (Kit Lang) and his office crush Janelle (Abria Jackson) get together with Blake and a few short-lived stereotypes – like office asshat Rudy (Vince Benvenuto) – to survive the night.

This combines the white collar massacre theme of Mayhem or The Belko Experiment with the tried-and-true formula of the Die Hard-in-a … action movie.  Like the recent Cleaner, it even defaults to OG format by not being Die Hard-up-a-mountain or Die Hard-on-a-yacht but Die Hard in an office building after hours (ie: just like Die Hard).  Director Illya Konstantin, who also co-wrote with Christopher Lang, must have scored some decent location permissions since we get to go all over the building, including some impressive spaces for fairly average bloody battles and skirmishes.  Though it presents Blake as an obvious baddie, it’s not especially sympathetic to the vigilantes – who are grim mass murderers – or even particularly angry about the generic wrong done by the generic big bad.

We don’t even find out much about the trial of wonder drug Azlepta – if it’s made the masked killers impervious to pain (one of the claims made for the product) that’s not mentioned in the script (though that would have been neat).  Lang overplays the shy schlub character, who incredibly seems to be waking up only now to the fact that he works for a monstrously evil outfit.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.