Bad Karaoke (Frightfest 2026)

Bad Karaoke opens with a tone so CW‑coded it’s almost confrontational; there was certainly nothing else at this year’s FrightFest that even came remotely close. The casting leans heavily on hot young things, the cinematography has that overtly digital gloss you associate with mid‑budget American genre TV, and the banter is pitched at a level that, to British ears, feels a bit playschool. All telltale signs of that school of American genre work — and that’s fine, it wouldn’t be such a cottage industry otherwise. The film’s early stretch is spent “getting to know the group,” but the characters are sketched from broad stereotypes. The “black guy” — Jonathan Jason Green’s Matt — is especially egregious on this front. I wouldn’t go as far as to describe the setup to Chris Lightbody and Robert J. Steinmiller Jr.’s Bad Karaoke as bad, more that it’s establishing a specific world and a specific cinematic language that you will either get behind or find difficult.

Once it moves past the introductions — and the whole idea of a party band, which is very alien to this Brit — Bad Karaoke reveals the actual hook: a cursed karaoke machine. It’s a fun idea, and the film commits to it with more enthusiasm than you’d expect from the opening act. The local community’s ambivalence toward this killer device becomes one of the film’s better running jokes, as everyone seems to know it’s dangerous, everyone seems to have a story about it, and nobody seems remotely surprised when it starts misbehaving again. That over‑familiarity gives the film a slightly off‑kilter charm, a sense that this town has simply folded supernatural murder into its local folklore.

The machine activates on its own and demands the party band sing a song one by one. If you don’t perform to the ghostly machine’s liking, it will ask the unlucky fool to choose their own death. And once those begin, the film finds a footing that’s easier to get behind — definitely more so than the CW vibes we opened on. Starting with an exploding heart, the kills become increasingly inventive. The machine grows increasingly slippery, moving from format to format in order to claim the souls of its victims. In that flexibility, it derails the biggest criticism many may have: “If the machine is cursed — just destroy it.” They do, eventually, and it leads Bad Karaoke to something with real cultural and real supernatural reach. For a good while, there’s very little survival instinct on display; instead, the characters behave with the kind of obliviousness that would sink a lesser film. However, the script is aware of this and leans into it. Their poor decision‑making becomes part of the joke rather than a flaw, and the film is all the better for it.

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Some of the karaoke performances are, indeed, bad — but that’s part of the gag. The “bad” in Bad Karaoke refers less to the singing and more to the machine behaving badly. There’s even a surprisingly thoughtful subtext about karaoke itself: the tension between familiar songs and new art, and how anything unfamiliar struggles to flourish under the weight of what came before. The film suggests that new art is always under the boot heel of the familiar, unable to grow because the old standards dominate the space. It’s a fascinating moral for a film built around a killer karaoke machine, giving the chaos a thematic spine that elevates it beyond merely being another killer‑possessed‑thing movie. It’s the same strategy that aided the likes of Justin Simien’s Bad Hair or Elza Kephart’s Slaxx.

To return to the digital slickness and flatness of the image for a moment: that whole production polish is an odd bedfellow with the nastiness of the gore, but the contrast becomes enjoyable. In fact, the longer the film goes on, the more confident it feels. The gore escalates, the concept expands, and the film’s glossy sheen starts to feel like part of the joke rather than a mismatch. Any movie that takes glee in turning one of its unlucky victims into soup — literally — knows exactly what it’s doing. The ending, however, is less certain. It shifts the timbre of the piece in a way that typifies the film’s ongoing conflict between slick Hollywood presentation and splattery horror. It’s not bad, but it’s not entirely satisfying either. Another choice that doesn’t work is replaying the cold open later in the film. It’s redundant, repetitive, and feels like padding — as if someone had a contractual obligation to hit a runtime rather than a storytelling need.

Even if it takes a while to find its voice, Bad Karaoke ultimately delivers a spooky singalong comedy with enough invention to justify its premise. The cursed machine is a cool idea, the kills stay fresh, and the film’s odd tonal marriage of slickness and nastiness becomes part of its charm. It’s messy, but it’s memorable — and far better once it stops trying to be a CW pilot and embraces being the killer karaoke movie you never knew you wanted. Also, the musical sections hit some pretty high highs.

Where’s the drunk uncle belting out Robbie Williams and Oasis songs? That’s the real karaoke experience.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – BAD KARAOKE