The mayor of Sommerton, PA wants to guarantee his re-election. His big idea for ensuring that happens? Hiring drug-addled, down-on-his-luck horror director Spencer Crowe (Dylan Walsh) to create a “fright fest” at an abandoned asylum on Halloween as an annual event. Unfortunately, for the town of Sommerton, a van full of prisoners — some of whom may be homicidal killers — crashes and two of them escape as the fright fest opens its doors. Soon, the patrons of the fest are being hunted down and murdered and it all seems like part of the show.
That’s the concept for American Fright Fest, a film directed by Ante Novakovic and written by Robert Gillings. Unfortunately, the concept is more promising than the execution.
From the get-go, American Fright Fest is an unfocused mess of a film. As we’re introduced to the characters, no one emerges that the audience can relate to or, for that matter, even tolerate. Spencer Crowe, the director who is given a last shot at redeeming himself by taking on this small-town gig, is quite frankly an asshole. The actors who make up the crew of the fright fest are all unlikable jerks. Even the mayor is a caricature of a politician.
Without anyone to care about, the story becomes the focal point and there really isn’t one. The script briefly attempts to set-up a supernatural backstory for the asylum but that is discarded immediately afterwards. What’s left is little better than a random selection of kills from an unnamed murderer for no apparent reason other than he’s “a monster.” Even gorehounds will be disappointed because many of the kills happen off-screen.
It’s not all bad, though. Some of the sequences inside the asylum display flashes of brilliance in terms of cinematography and blocking. And Dylan Walsh’s performance as Crowe is so off-the-rails that it eventually becomes interesting albeit for the wrong reasons.
American Fright Fest is too disorganized to be scary, too serious to be funny, and too clichéd to recommend at all.
1.5 out of 5.0 stars
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