It's 1983 and the video shops are bursting with independent horror movies. Whether it's teen slashers, Cronenberbian body nightmares, supernatural forces, the shelves are heavy with cinematic murder and mayhem. Joel has coped with his lonely fascination with the genre by starting his own magazine Vicious Fanatics. We meet him as he watches a Wes Craven like director going over the editing of the new masked killer movie. Joel is tut tutting about the lack of originality instead of doing the interview he's there for. The director stops him with a question of what Joel would do instead. Joel's response is well rehearsed and has at least the ring of deep thought to it. He is shown the door.
Later, languishing at home, he gets drunk while waiting for his flatmate. She comes in and all but evicts him for the evening as a girlfriend comes around for movies and pizza. He has already seen her getting dropped off and pashed by some blocky alpha boy and is developing a sense of rejection that only the self deluded can create when imagining connections between themselves and the objects of their affection. But it's not happening tonight (again) so he drunkenly resolves to follow the guy in a vague hope of finding some way of discrediting him to her.
He ends up at a bar, sidles up to the bad guy who turns out to be quite friendly. Joel then all but drowns in drink and disappointment as he tries to work the bar for himself. He crashes in a broom closet and wakes to find the bar closed and bursts in on what seems like a self help group who welcome him. After fumbling a few vague confessions which could be about any addiction he finds out they are talking about how hooked they are on murder. Enter the missing group member who with a hilarious debunking of Joel's pet horror movie project exposes him as a fraud. Then it's on.
There are the expectable nods to the horror hall of fame in character names and some subversions of old tropes but where this film gets it right is that it leaves these incidental and concentrates on the tension and comedy of the central situations. In lulls it reveals how thin is the divide between its ambitions and the cheaper aspects of fulfilling them. These happen at junctions where the writing has been left undercooked and the pace has slackened for some character development. This is not an unknown flaw (entire third acts of Wes Anderson movies depend on it as a feature) but it can edge towards cuteness in a film so bent on keeping momentum high to work properly. While this does happen more than once it never drags the whole down with it. A flatly functional cop at the station has been reading Joel's magazine and has a highly articulate speech about why horror is a respectable genre of cinema. It only just works because the delivery renders it a stoner in a police uniform gives us such a funny juxtaposition that we let it through.
Vicious Fun is all up what its title claims for it. As an invitation to revel in the baseness of human behaviour that the legacy of '80s horror supplies it is a chorus of pure glee. If you were inclined against horror as a vulgar interest this film has a lesson for you that you might not mind taking. If you are already in there with the rest of us, it's still fun.
Vicious Fun is on Shudder.
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