Murder Party - Nice idea, but its execution is hit and miss

‘Murder Party’ is about just that.  A bunch of pretentious (psychopathic!) art students send out random invitations for strangers to attend the titular Halloween ‘murder party.’ Their reasons... they want to kill them (and call it ‘art’).

Only one person is lonely enough to take them up on their invite.  A loser who basically has no friends and makes his own costume out of cardboard drops by, only to find himself tied up and gagged while the nut-jobs decide how best to murder him.

Now, the problem I had with it was that our unwitting ‘hero’ spends most of his time tied up and gagged.  Therefore, we hardly get to know much about him, other than what we saw at the beginning, which basically shows us how much of a loser he is.  Therefore, it’s hard to relate to him or care much about his predicament.  We really get to know his captors more them him for the first two thirds of the movie.  And his captors aren’t the sort of people you’d really want to get to know.

The gang of murderous art students are a pretty awful bunch.  Yes, they’re the ‘villains’ of the movie, so we’re hardly meant to root for them, but without a decent hero to follow there’s no one you’re going to care that much about.

There are plenty of murders and the natural gore to go with it, but there isn’t really that much story.  There’s a few nice moments of black humour which help out the viewing and it is a pretty short film (it needs to be!).

It’s not awful, but I felt like there were long periods of time that felt like they had only been put in there to extend the runtime of a movie that doesn’t really have enough plot to warrant it being anything other than a TV episode (length).

5/10 a hard trek, a bit like unicycling to Mordor and back