From the ridiculous title to the 20 minute long cold open, #AMFAD never pretends to be subtle. The plot is ripped from early post Scream slashers with echoes of Urban Legend, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Cherry Falls, and others of that ilk… except absolutely everything is cranked up to 11.
Marcus Dunstan directs the fuck out of this, bringing life to baffling characters that would feel more at home in Club Dread, James Gunn’s Scooby Doo, or Scary…
First off, credit where credit is due. This is an impressive effort, given it's a budgetless student film. The performances are uneven, but trend towards good, and there some solid sequences of tension. That said, this film's climax comes off as baffling transphobic, and just left an overall bad taste in my mouth, especially with the Scooby-Doo-esque way that the villain is defeated. It's a trite trope that may have been fine in Psycho and Silence of the Lambs, but nowadays falls flat.
A surprisingly effective piece of found footage that feels a lot like a Korean reimagining of Grave Encounters. It follows a group of ghost hunters venturing into a haunted asylum for a live-streamed online show. It's a fairly played-out concept in found footage, but this film manages to make it unique and interesting.
Each of the film's six ghost hunters has 2-3 cameras, and the seventh character edits it in real-time for the Livestream audience, providing an excellent framing mechanism…
