Horror Movie Review: Die Influencers Die (2020)

Do you like metal music? Do you enjoy lots of blood and guts? What about boobs? How about incessant mocking of the vapid influencer lifestyle? If you answered yes to some or all of those, then Die Influencers Die thinks you’re going to like what it has to offer.

You won’t though, because it is thrashy and sleazy, but not in a fun way. Not only that, it’s pretty basic and lacking in imagination. Which is baffling when you consider it has three writers credited. Kelly Garrett-Orona, Mike Karaoke, and Gary Dean Orona, the latter of whom also directed.

Tabitha Stevens plays Moxie, an aging model, who is under pressure to embrace the modern world of social media, otherwise she faces being left behind. This is pointed out to her by the creepy Max (Jeff Tortora) who tries his hand, in a literal way.

Moxie rejects him, but Max isn’t one to handle rejection well, torturing her and leaving her for dead in the grotty basement of his production studio. Just before she dies though, she is visited by a being known as a Coyote (played by metal vocalist Lizzy Borden) and offered a choice. Take death, or become an instrument of revenge. Of course, she chooses the latter, but before anything can happen, her body is stuffed inside a freezer to be forgotten about for years.

Stue Harrington is a vlogger with millions of followers, and always on the lookout for rising social media stars to ‘team’ up with. He identifies three up and coming influencers (extreme outdoorsman, beauty expert, and angry goth girl) and decides to pit them against each other at the (now abandoned) studio. There, they will compete for attention via a live-stream.

Of course, Moxie has been trapped for so long, and she is about to get free. You ain’t ever seen a livestream like this before.

Well, that’s a lie, because of course you have. Die Influencers Die isn’t doing anything fresh or clever with the slasher genre here. Nor does it have any compelling reasons to watch beyond blood and boobs, which there is plenty of. The problem is that it has two tricks and it does them over and over again to the point of boredom.

One is the incessant mocking of influencer culture. We get it, it’s dumb and these characters are dumb. It ends up going so far with this though that they stop being believable as people, something that isn’t helped by the less than stellar acting. The second surrounds Moxie and her killing process. Shot with frenetic cuts while heavy metal blasts out, it might look cool the first time, but the law of diminishing results applies here.

The film staggers from one death scene to the next with very little happening in between. Aside from even more jabs at influencers.

No knocking Tabitha Stevens though, who does a good job in the Moxie role and looks suitably dangerous once reanimated as a devilish tool. Of course, being mostly naked throughout the film was never going to be a big problem for her, considering what she is more famous for.

Forgotten, moments after it ends, Die Influencers Die is lacking in too many areas to be a recommended watch. All the things the film thinks you want to see can be found in far better films that do this same thing in far more interesting ways.