Hapless ordinary schnook Christopher S. Hawley (a solid and likeable performance by Chris Sharp) finds an invitation to a Halloween costume party that he discovers is actually a trap concocted by a group of unhinged artists who plan on killing him.

Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier nicely captures a festive Halloween mood, maintains a deliciously dry and deadpan, yet still dark and warped tone throughout, pokes wickedly nasty fun at pretentious artsy fartsy types, and delivers oodles of outrageous gore in the wild last third. Moreover, the distinctive characters are well drawn, the deliberate pacing evokes an unnerving feeling of real world time, and the main cramped setting projects an unsettling sense of claustrophobia. The sound acting by a competent no-name cast rates as another substantial asset, with especially praiseworthy contributions from Sandy Barnett as sadistic and duplicitous ringleader Alexander, Macon Blair as lovestruck doofus Macon, Stacy Rock as snarky bimbo Lexi, William Lacey as the laconic and reserved Bill, and Paul Goldblatt as meek photographer Paul. Saulnier's fluid gliding cinematography provides a pleasing polished look. A savagely enjoyable hoot.

It's Halloween. A lonely middle-aged man finds an invite to a party, creates himself a costume from some cardboard boxes, and goes to the address on the card, unaware that the aspiring artists who wrote the invite are waiting there to kill him as part of their latest projects.

Listed as a horror/comedy, Murder Party is a disappointment whichever way you see it: as a horror, it is totally lacking in tension or scares, and only delivers some mediocre gore in the second half; as a dark comedy, this supposedly scathing satire on the New York art scene is even less successful, devoid of genuine wit. It takes a good while for the murder to begin, the run up to the killing involving lots of drug use, after which the annoying characters engage in inane introspective conversation that proves extremely dull.

Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier's debut feature does little to suggest a promising future in film-making, but his subsequent two movies seem to have received generally good reviews (I've only seen Green Room and thought it was very entertaining). Let's chalk up this film's failure to a lack of experience...

Sometimes you have to get things out of your system. And one of the best things I can say about the movie is that you can not really predict where it is going. But characters are as crazy as they can be and the actors seem way too uncomfortable for their own good. But not in a good way. Now some may already know that one of the actors went ahead and did Blue Ruin with the director - a movie so raw, so full of dirt and great cinematography, this would pale in comparison anyway.

So we also have some very nice effects, passages where nothing is said and quite a few coincidences. Chainsaw is all I'm saying - but it is a movie, isn't it? Again, I've seen worse, but it can be annoying and it may feel like it takes ages to move on ... there could have been more I reckon, but it seems to have helped getting other stuff of the ground, so there's that