Fans flock to a festival celebrating the most iconic horror movies, only to discover that the charismatic showman behind the event has a diabolical agenda. As festival attendees start dying off, three teenagers – more schooled in horror-film cliches than practical knowledge about neutralizing psycho killers – must band together and battle through various madmen and monstrosities to survive. – (Source)

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 58% (Critics) / 56% (Audience)
MetaScore: 54 – Mixed or average reviews
Directed By: Owen Egerton
Written By: Owen Egerton
Starring: Robbie Kay, Seychelle Gabriel, Jacob Batalan, Barbara Dunkelman, Tate Donovan and Zachary Levi
Studio: Cinedigm Entertainment

The Good:
The majority of the characters in this movie were thoroughly enjoyable to watch and they were played by actors who seemed to be having as much fun with their roles as you would hope the actors in a movie like this would be enjoying themselves. And that enjoyment came through in their performances.

The homages to well known horror movies was cool and this movie did not skimp on the gore at all but it was whimsically gory which I liked a lot. And there is a really funny cameo by Zachary Levi that was one of the high points of the movie.

The Bad:
Robbie Kay was the wrong choice for the lead in this movie. He was a nonentity from his first scene and it was made worse by the fact that his supporting cast were all more engaged in the material than he ever seemed to be.

There is a balance that a horror-comedy (or comedy-horror) film has to have that let’s the viewer know exactly what kind of horror-comedy it is. It can be a slapsticky kind of horror-comedy it doesn’t really treat character deaths as being all that important aside from just being a necessary evil. Then there are the horror-comedy films that try to have a little heart and pathos to them where a character’s death has meaning and the audience is supposed to feel something when characters are killed. BLOOD FEST tries to be the latter type of film but it screws the pooch by making character deaths seem to have meaning only for the surviving characters to not seem to be bothered by those deaths 2 minutes after they happen. This annoys me because it creates a sort of disconnect between me and the film because I end up caring more than the characters in the movie when their friends are killed.

This movie also had the most convoluted plot I have ever seen in any movie. There were a million and one ways to create the same situation that drives this film without having such a mess of a plot to have to dig through.

The Ugly:
There is one specific death that is handled in a pretty slapdash way on top of not really being necessary. If this one character had survived the entire movie it would have made for a more enjoyable experience than the character’s death ever provided.

Final Verdict: A generally entertaining first 45 minutes goes off the rails in the last half which makes BLOOD FEST a really uneven movie that never quite satisfies the horror fan in me as much as I was hoping to be satisfied.

Grade: C+