2024 #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead

Screenshot
  • Directed by Marcus Dunstan
  • Written by Josh Sims, Jessica Sarah Flaum, John Baldecchi
  • Stars Jade Pettyjohn, JoJo Sims, Jenniger Ends
  • Run Time: 1 Hour, 36 Minutes
  • Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd82Owk5j1Y

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

The seven deadly sins are very deadly in this set up where we wonder who the killer is and gradually figure out why. It’s got some mystery elements, a little dark humor, and plenty of gore. It had enough different things going on to be quite interesting. We were entertained.

Spoilery Synopsis

We see news reports about seven college students being murdered at a music festival. They’re arranged as the Seven Deadly Sins. The crime leads to a popular podcast series, horror film, and even a TV series. Twenty years later, the music festival returns– but the killer is still at large. 

Colette narrates the trauma of being betrayed by a friend who then kills herself. 

Two years later, Karmapalooza is the big thing on social media. We see various stereotypical horror movie characters in flashes. Sarah is one of them, and she’s Colette’s friend. Liv shows up, and the pair plan to go to the festival. They pick up Will, Guy, and L.B.. Aaron works at the food store, so he has to work, but he might come later. Mona shows up, and she’s a self-absorbed influencer. 

Rick, Mona’s agent, calls, and he likes Liv and Sarah. Suddenly, the tire blows and they stop the van. A cop stops, and everyone scrambles to hide their drugs. L.B. hides his coke up his butt, but Guy is fine with his huge bag of weed. The cop explains that they’ll need a place to stay tonight, since the repair might take some time. The whole group piles into the police car and heads to the only B&B available in the area. 

Inside, they find Seven Deadly Sins shot glasses, and there’s something on TV about the Sins as well. They all discuss which character gets which sin-glass. Sarah gets the last glass, Wrath. Someone is watching the whole thing on their camera. Credits FINALLY roll (20 minutes in) as we hear a voiceover about the Seven Deadly Sins… again.

Mona and Sarah talk about old friends, and Sarah is evasive about her high school social life. The group live streams themselves doing coke, pills, and more, filming filming the whole time. Mona tries to teach Liv how to trend on the socials. 

Guy decides to go to a music show on his own tonight and leaves. He’s extremely high  and hallucinates a talking squirrel. Then someone Tases him from behind and he wakes up, wearing a pig nose, to see the word “Gluttony” in the mirror. The bad guy plugs in a hose, and Guy’s stomach gets bigger and bigger until it explodes. The villain fills the Gluttony shot glass with his blood. 

Back at the house, Mona and L.B. go upstairs for sex, with the camera on, of course. The killer comes into the room, sees the camera, and backs off. Mona senses someone in the room and calls the others. They get a group chat from…. Colette. “You’ll all pay for that.” Will explains that Collette knew most of them back in college. She got between Mona and L.B. and after a fight Colette killed herself. They all argue over whether or not it was really a suicide. 

Liv gets angry and storms out. Liv tells Sarah that Mona was playing with Colette and turned on her at the last minute. Liv leaves to go meet a guy online, and she gets grabbed. She wakes chained up in a bathtub with a big bucket marked “Greed” over her head. Sarah and L.B. watch the whole thing on the phone. The bucket dumps acid all over Liv and she quickly dies. Sarah calls Aaron for a ride to the concert, and he says he’ll come. 

Everyone seems to forget that there was actual video of a stalker being inside the house, and whatever they saw of Liv’s death is all instantly forgotten. L.B. goes upstairs for sex, and he gets thoroughly slashed. 

Aaron shows up and finds L.B.’s blood everywhere, but no body. The group hears laughing in the previously-locked basement and go down to investigate. It’s a re-creation of “The Shack” the place they all used to hang out and where Colette died. There’s video playing of six people standing in front of the fire that burned the place down. 

Sarah, who wasn’t there, wants to know the whole story. Mona admits they found Colette’s body, and then they burned the place down to cover it up. They all blame each other. They find the seven shot glasses again, this time, along with photos of all of them. 

Then they find a big room with elaborate displays of the remains of the previous victims. Suddenly, Will gets an axe in the back and becomes “Sloth.”

Sarah, Mona, and Aaron run from the killer through the neon-lit basement maze, but the killer is really well prepared. The girls end up using Aaron as a human shield, which goes badly for him. Mona pulls the knife out of Aaron and stabs the killer, but it barely slows him down. The killer is unmasked, and it’s Officer Shaw, the cop who brought them there.

Mona and Shaw fight until Sarah cuts Mona’s throat. She lives long enough to see the whole explanation. Shaw saw Sarah and stopped her from killing herself over depression about Colette. Shaw says the Seven Deadly Sins thing was inspired by an old case that’s still unsolved. Sarah and Colette were lovers until Mona wrecked that. Mona dies as we see how this was all set up. 

Sarah takes one last look at her “museum” and then calls 911 in a panic. Soon, the police are everywhere, including Shaw, in uniform. Detective Daniels says it looks just like that old case from 2003. It could be the same guy or maybe a copycat. 

Shaw asks Sarah about who took that video of the six friends years ago. Sarah went to the cabin expecting to kill Mona and killed Colette accidentally. 

Inside, the detective finds L.B.’s video, and he recognizes Shaw’s tattoo on the murderer. He runs outside and shoots Shaw. 

We then watch news footage that there have been seven dead students, and that it’s all happened again. 

Sarah sits in the back of an ambulance and gets a call from Mona’s agent, Rick. “You’re a survivor! Do you realize you already have a million followers?” Then she gets a call from someone– the original SDSK serial killer. “Everyone you know is dead.” 

Brian’s Commentary

The film subtly mentions the Seven Deadly Sins about nineteen times before the credits even roll, so we made a wild guess that they would affect the plot somehow. The seven characters are all one-dimensional stereotypes anyway, so it’s not a stretch. The killer’s lair has a whole bunch of very elaborate death traps

JoJo Siwa, who played Colette, got second-billing for less than a minute of screen time. Good contract! In the very first scene, we see Colette with Sarah, so there’s really no surprise later. As we expected the “original” serial killer to show up at some point, but that never materialized– until the end credit sequence. 

The killer’s digital mask is a neat prop. Some of the deaths are excessive, and there is pretty good gore here. 

Kevin’s Commentary

I enjoyed this one quite a bit. The seven deadly sins are certainly made loud and clear. The mystery element made it more interesting, the effects are good, and the story is clever.