Marry F*** Kill (2023) Review

Marry F*** Kill, yes that is the actual title asterisks and all, begins with Beth (Devin Cecchetto, The Craft: Legacy, Who Killed Our Father?) performing a ritual that involves multiple uses of the words “love”, “lust”, and “Asmodeus” while having what appears to be flashbacks of group sex that are as tame as you would expect from a film that censors its own title. Once she finishes she slashes her own throat.

Five of her friends, Grant (Jedidiah Goodacre, Margaux, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), Paige (Maxine Denis, Polarized, Reporting Live), Simon (Robbie G.K., Antisocial 2, Full Out), Helen (Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks, From, It’s Not You) and Vickie (Deanna Jarvis, Demons Inside Me, Too Close for Christmas) gather for her funeral and the reading of her will. Her lawyer (Xavier Sotelo, Aquaslash, X-Men: Dark Phoenix) has informed them that they’ve been mentioned in it, something that comes as a surprise to her Aunt Stephanie (Tanya Clarke, Young, Stalked, and Pregnant, Beware of the Midwife).

If this sounds familiar, you won’t be surprised to learn that, due to a warning from Officer Jack (Michael Buie, Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, The Next Three Days) about unfriendly locals, they’re staying at her house rather than a hotel. And that the house has secrets to reveal and people to kill.

Director Caroline Labrèche started out her career with the interesting sci-fi thriller Radius before falling in with Incendo Productions and cranking out the likes of All My Husband’s Wives and Farmer Seeking Love. Here she’s paired with Ian Carpenter and Aaron Martin, the writers behind Incendo’s reboot of Terror Train and its sequel.

They don’t give her a lot to work with. Right from the start the characters that populate Marry F*** Kill got on my nerves. They are some of the most unlikable plot devices I’ve run across in a while. They, or at least four of them, are the reason Beth is dead and the only reason they knew about it was the lawyer contacting them. But they showed up because they were in the will. They walk into her funeral shit-talking somebody. They couldn’t start dying fast enough.

When they do start dying, shortly after the game of Marry F*** Kill the film gets its name from, the deaths aren’t anything special. Someone is thrown into a tree by an invisible presence but all we see is blood splatter. Another is grabbed and dragged under the bed. We’re talking Horror Writing 101 level scares.

The scene where Beth’s ex is having sex with her ghost when it transforms is at least unintentionally funny. Not in the least because it might be hallucinations from the extra potent weed, grown at the intersection of two ley lines so it has supernatural properties, that Aunt Stephanie gave them. Unintentionally funny also describes some of the revelations about some of the characters’ family histories.

I know that these Tubi Originals aren’t meant for hardcore horror fans, but Marry F*** Kill is the kind of film that drives casual viewers away from the genre. It’s not scary and everything is so cliche and obvious that it won’t take much familiarity with the genre to stay one step ahead of the characters. For anyone who is familiar with these kinds of films after the first few minutes the temptation will be strong to jump to the end just to see if figured it out. And you probably will have.

A collection of cliches, obvious red herrings, off-screen deaths, and hoaky dialogue that doesn’t even deliver jump scares, Marry F*** Kill can Fuck Right Off.

Marry F*** Kill is available free to watch on Tubi wherever it’s available. If you’re looking for something similar, but hopefully better, FilmTagger can make some suggestions.