FrightFest review – Starsuckers

FrightFest review – Starsuckers

A British-accented, slightly sneery narrator (Steven Hobé) introduces us to influencer queen Sasha (Manon Ens-Lapointe) and never-got-up-the-hill B movie star Bjorg (James Alex), a colourful, superficial celebrity couple who’ve just had a baby and can only think to call it Baby.  The narration overeggs how vapid and contemptible these people are, as if we couldn’t tell from their posturing, brittle smiles and satirical touches like Sasha selling her own tears online and Bjrog starring in an endless stream of nonsensical-sounding action pictures.  The couple invite superfans Eileen (Jersey Anderson) and Chuck (Jacob Stickles) for a bonding weekend of sorts in an anonymously-rented luxurious Air BnB on a lakeshore – which is a scenario we’ve seen before in many recent horror pictures, confirmed as Bjorg goes round the house taping weapons to accessible places (setup for a very funny punchline).  It turns out that the narrator is a person, Belvedere the driver, and Bjorg shocks the visitors by ripping out the narrator’s tongue and strangling him with it … all the while criticising him for doing a terrible job on this film’s soundtrack, suggesting that the metafiction is spiralling out of control again.

Written and directed by Brett M. and Jason G. Butler – who bill themselves as ‘the Butler Brothers’ – this is a colourful, eye-catching oddity, played at a pitch only slightly below the peak of arch overinsistence found in the works of Jim Hosking (The Greasy Strangler, Ebony & Ivory).  At this stage in the game, it’s flogging a dead horse to make fun of celebrity-influencer culture … and even the notion that non-celebs will go through all manner of self-abasement and degradation to crash a charmed circle of likes and subscribes has had more than enough air time.  Here, the wannabes are tasked with getting rid of Belvedere’s corpse thanks to circular reasoning and S&B’s need to get them good and incriminated, but there are signs that Eileen especially is laserfocused on what she wants and that the apparent dommes in the quartet are vulnerable to an overthrow of the system.  By comparison, the bearded, amiable and exceptionally dim Chuck just goes along with it.  The film doesn’t quite do enough original things to justify all the effort taken to lay into people who have done a great job of exposing and indeed celebrating their own mercenary shallowness – but it does have really committed performances, a bright and poppy look and enough funny throwaways and incidental gags to keep you onboard.