#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead

by Mike McGranaghan

After half an hour of watching #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead, I was ready to bail. The characters are so obnoxious and self-centered that I didn’t want to spend another second in their company. Then the movie did something interesting – it started gruesomely killing them off. That was the point when it dawned on me that the whole film is about wanting to see these shallow jerks get what’s coming to them. It’s a satire of the vapid nature of influencers (and wannabe influencers) who mistakenly think their every move is of great fascination to the world at large. #AMFAD still doesn’t totally work, but it inarguably improves after those first 30 minutes.

College student Sarah (Jade Pettyjohn) hops in a van to attend a concert with her friends, Instagram star Liv (Ali Fumiko Whitney), Instagram hopeful Mona (Jennifer Ens), slacker Will (Justin Derickson), live-streaming playboy L.B. (Julian Haig), and pothead Guy (Jack Doupe-Smith). Aaron (Cardi Wong), the nice guy madly in love with Sarah, joins them later. He works at a pharmacy, and everyone has convinced him to steal some meds they can get high on.

When a blown tire leaves them stranded in the middle of nowhere, a friendly female cop arranges a house for them to stay in for the night. A masked killer is in the home and begins murdering the group one-by-one in Saw-type traps, each based on one of the seven deadly sins. The key to these slayings may spring from the suicide of Collette (Jojo Siwa), a shared figure from the gang’s past. Oddly, Siwa is the most well-known cast member, yet she appears only in flashback snippets where she doesn’t get to speak or develop her role.

The central joke of the movie is that these people are too wrapped up in themselves to be able to survive. None of them, except maybe for Sarah, can see anything outside of their narcissistic bubbles. Because they focus so much on the online world, the real world is kind of a mystery to them. (They never even think to look for a spare tire in the van.) As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that #AMFAD’s theme is how people can use social media to make each other’s lives miserable. The characters are not heroes. They are, in fact, horrible, back-stabbing human beings. Do they deserve to endure torture like getting stabbed to death with a bladed dildo? Not necessarily, but since they’re fictional, it’s a certain amount of fun to watch them get dispatched, especially since the kills are so inventive.

If the rest of the picture worked better, this would have been a nifty entry in the slasher genre. A couple flaws prevent that from happening. We’ve seen the whole “killings inspired by the seven deadly sins” thing before in David Fincher’s Se7en. Picking another basis for the murders that didn’t evoke memories of a modern classic would have been a good idea. It’s also extremely easy to guess who’s behind the mask, since there are only so many characters in the movie who aren’t in the central group. That takes away a huge chunk of the mystery.

Director Marcus Dunstan (The Collector) gives the movie a brisk pace and he stages the violence with flair. A movie needs to do more than cathartically kill off unlikable characters to hold anyone’s attention, though. #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead lacks the sort of plot development that makes viewers eager to see what’s next. There’s some decent stuff in here, just not enough to elevate the film into anything particularly noteworthy.

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