hyped garbage

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

When Bill says "f**k this whole scene - everybody dies!" - he means the whole pretentious art scene, the pseudo-Manhattan lifestyle, the second-rate living. The main point here is the filmmakers believed the mid-2000s gentrification of Brooklyn was/is destructive. It's not just about their bad amateurish art, it's also about their lack of imagination. For example, on costuming, Bill dresses out of The Warriors, Lexi out of Blade Runner, Paul out of Lestat, etc. In contrast, Chris uses his imagination and dresses as a knight made from an old box, from which he cheerfully throws away a perfectly good pre-fab Halloween costume. It's a sort of David-vs.-Goliath on a small scale.The entirety is unmasked under a "truth serum" extended scene, wherein we learn that everyone is pretty ordinary. Macon loves Lexi, Paul is confused of his identity by religion and sexuality, and Alexander is just another junkie from New Jersey, not Manhattan. Only Chris is exactly who he says he is, a ticketing agent for the NYPD who has pretty much no secrets, an everyman superman, if you will, a knight in "shining" armor.The plot is simple: an invite for a "murder party" placed to the wind reaches our lonesome hero by pure happenstance, and when he arrives he becomes a victim of would-be murderers who will do it for the "art" of it, and oh yes the money too. This plot is fleshed out with the above-mentioned hacking and slashing of pretentiousness, done so with panache, class, and style, a real triumph of the screenplay over anything desired by the so-called Brooklyn artists herein. This is a commentary/morality play which is part "save our neighborhoods" and "save our civilization"!Dialogue is well-done, and does not itself exceed into pretentious overreach. It sticks to its goals, to skewer its victims. Chris is literally and metaphorically gagged for most of the film, as if to say "we're going to let the pretentious do themselves in and not have Bruce Willis wise-cracking."Good gore, and plenty of it, although in the 1970's/1980'd retro vein, again not trying to be "arty" or "new wave." Just good old fashioned chainsaw to the eyeballs and so forth.All in all, this exceeds Troma for story and cultural commentary, and will be enjoyed by anyone with a sense of humor.

The Plot.On Halloween Eve in Brooklyn, an average Joe loser named Chris finds an invitation to a costume party. Arriving at the "party", Chris discovers he's fallen prey to the lethal trap set by deranged artists. As the night wears on, rivalries within the group flare up. A body count accrues, and Chris must take advantage of the ensuing chaos if he's to survive the night.Plow budget but it works. Yes, the story sort of doesn't make sense all that much, but they make it interesting and so you're willing to stick it out to see what happens!

'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).

MURDER PARTY is a supposed spoof of slasher movies, thrillers where people are held hostage as well as a vehicle for poking fun at art generally.The plot sees Chris, a somewhat lonely guy who lives alone with a cat, finding an invitation to a murder party. He makes a very ridiculous Sir Lancelot costume from cardboard boxes and goes to the party, which is held at a warehouse. There is no party and Chris finds himself trapped by a group of deranged drug addicts who plan to kill him and film the act.The first few minutes of the movie were quite good and suitably misleading for what is to follow. There was nothing funny but Chris was an interesting character to start with. He would have been great in a different movie.By the time he gets to the party, things go downhill quickly. This would have been better if made as a serious horror/thriller since its attempts to be funny come off as downright ridiculous or plain bizarre.Chris Sharp plays the lead role very well. His reactions were well captured. In a more serious production, I would have been rooting for his character. But with this being a parody, I knew he was never in serious danger of harm.The remaining actors are all terrible, either underacting or overacting in various degrees.Most of this movie takes place in a single setting - a warehouse. There is nothing wrong with this - if the story and script play out well. Unfortunately they do not. The deranged drug addicts just talk a lot of endless nonsense about art and film whilst Chris is gagged and tied to a chair. Some scenes carry on like this for 10 minutes or more, making the modest running time drag out somewhat.The direction is very much along the lines of parodies such as SCARY MOVIE. The gags are telegraphed in advance, the attempts at humour are massively overplayed, there is comic music in the background when Chris tries to escape and there are some incredibly silly special effects.I am a fan of "so-bad-it's-good" movies such as CAMP BLOOD, THE NAIL GUN MASSACRE, TROLL 2, DON'T GO IN THE WOODS and CHOPPING MALL just to name a few. Comparing these laugh riots to MURDER PARTY proves that humour deriving from a serious subject only works when it is UNINTENTIONAL.Overall, MURDER PARTY is a seriously unfunny movie that has one interesting thing about it - the main character. It is hard to recommend this to anyone, except for perhaps fans of SCARY MOVIE or other intentional spoofs. For everyone else, I advise keeping to established serious horror or go with "so-bad-it's-good" classics.