Grimmfest 2023 - Film Review - 8 Found Dead (2023)

8 Found Dead is a dirty intergenerational war of nerves that uses timeline gymnastics and abrasive humour to deconstruct the rental invasion subgenre.

A quartet of egotistical influencers, actors, and Insta-partners head off to a desert Airbnb where one of them plans on making a game-changing announcement. Unfortunately, they appear to have double booked with a bohemian thespian couple whose filterless bile threatens to eclipse their own virulent sense of entitlement.

Director Travis Greene’s caustic and crass dark comedy uses a fractured structure to disorientate the viewer and shake up conventions. Gimmicky or not it mostly works but of course, any element of surprise is diluted by its tricksy trifecta of perspectives.

The obvious double-booked rental touchstone for 8 Found Dead is the recent hit Barbarian. The left-field twist deployed by the latter was the principal reason it punched far above its creative weight so kudos to Greene for staging his film in a polar opposite manner. It’s patchy and overstyled in its quest for originality but at least it’s brave enough to plant its feet and kick conformity in the nut sacks.

The Airbnb bloodbath is a budding subgenre that is a distilled byproduct of our times and is in many ways a natural step in the evolution of the Cabin in the Woods horror flick. On a more established playing field, 8 Found Dead would be strangled by its own audacity but it exploits the modernist refresh to invent some rules of its own.

Narcissistic and nasty the four characters who find themselves in a sociopathic pissing contest with our pair of egregious actors are wholesale horrible. Social media-obsessed hyenas who rent permanent Airbnb’s situated up their own arseholes. The film spends some of its scant runtime trying to imbue them with relatability and warmth but ultimately fails. This may seem negative but it actually works in the movie’s favour. Not least in the fact we are treated to early images of their lifeless corpses to make their selfish mewlings more tolerable.

We know the fate of these dreadful people from the outset and that renders 8 Found Dead all about design rather than destiny. Or as the film’s tagline puts it – “Fuck who whodunit, it’s who survives.” To succeed it has to plug the gaps where surprise and shock should be and to be perfectly fair it makes a diverting and amusingly gross sport out of it.

There is a relatively tedious subplot involving the police officers who attend the bloody scene of the titular massacre, and some catty social commentary involving the Insta-twats. However, the real entertainment comes via the outrageous verbal and physical atrocities committed by the unwelcome interlopers Richard and Liz.

Brilliantly played by real-life married couple Tim Simek and Rosanne Limeres they are clearly having fun cooking up some seriously slimy screen chemistry. Liz is a mentally septic cougar with no mercy and Richard is a sleazy mime aficionado with a degenerate God-complex.

Together they weaponise oversharing and take potty-mouthed potshots at pop culture in order to further poison the dynamic of jealousy, mistrust, and plain dislike between the four ‘ friends’. As a result, we get to enjoy salacious delights such as recollections of champagne-fueled post-nuptial sodomy and Jaws becomes ‘ Fist fucking a puppet through a rehashed morality tale.’

This mean-spiritedness does give 8 Found Dead a satisfying salty kick, but it makes a mistake in shoehorning breast cancer into the mischievous mix. Not because the disease should be off limits in genre film, nor because it may upset and offend, but because while desperately trying to be edgy it bulldozers into being patronising instead.

If only the film had such a no fucks given approach to the onscreen gore. While the effects and violence are by no means badly executed, they fail to match its verbal ferocity. Greater imagination and meatier conviction in the death scene department could well have elevated it into the instant cult classic it so very wants to be.

The tacked-on ending threatens an origin story prequel. It’s so minimalistic that it suggests the filmmakers are waiting to see how audiences react to the cynical spitefulness of Richard and Liz before daring to unleash them again.

Loud and obnoxious with a stonking soundtrack and dangerously quotable lines 8 Found Dead is the perfect watch for when you want to hate the world and enjoy yourself doing it.