Bad Karaoke world première at FrightFest, 30th August 2026
Bad Karaoke opens in 2012, in a small-town bar. As a drunk man (Justin Miner) staggers forward and angrily unplugs the ‘Song-a-Ling’ karaoke machine that others are enjoying, he electrocutes both himself and the woman at the live mic (Kate Miner), whose rendition of the old standard I Only Have Eyes For You is interrupted by her own eyeballs literally flying across the room, Evil Dead II-style, and landing with a plop in someone’s beer glass. We already have a pretty good idea, even before the title appears on the screen, that Chris Lightbody and Robert J. Steinmiller Jr.’s film is going to be a darkly funny, heavily ironised take on popular musical entertainment.
Cut to the present, and the Portland band Nunu is on the road. The band was once a sensation and had several hits, but despite their abiding talent, over a decade of infighting, breakups and personnel changes has diluted their brand, and reduced them to gigs singing covers at weddings. In a van bound for one such soulless commission are founding member and singer Hannah (Kat Cunning), keyboardist Emily (Lexi Underwood), guitarist Noah (Case Walker) and drummer Logan (Kevin Clayette), while Hannah’s girlfriend Ava (Jenna Karan) and Logan’s best friend Matt (Jonathan Jason Green) are along for the ride – but on their way they stop in for drinks at a now familiar small-town bar, where Emily picks up an abandoned karaoke machine that the bartender is only too happy to have taken off his hands.
Having found the modern mountain cabin they have rented for the night, the intoxicated sextet connect up the Song-a-Ling, and Logan starts with a version of party track Sexy and I Know It. It is a spirited rendition, with wild moves accompanying it, but the machine thinks otherwise. “Poor performance,” the text on the television reads, “Select your death” – something that they all laugh off until, a few minutes later, Logan’s heart bursts bloodily out of his chest. This karaoke machine is cursed, and the remaining five will all have to sing to its sinister tune without fully understanding the criteria of its life-or-death judgments.
Anyone who has ever attended a horror-focused film festival will quickly realise that karaoke is part of these events’ lifeblood, as festival goers who have been cooped up together all day watching depravities on screen get to let loose and release all that tension by belting out numbers to a room full of strangers with similar tastes in genre cinema. Karaoke performances can be virtuosic and soulful, or sloppy and amateurish – and both can be equally entertaining. Indeed, a paradox that karaoke shares with horror is that being bad is often precisely what makes it good. Bad Karaoke gets to have it every which way, merging karaoke and horror under a single roof, and having an absurd time exploring the aesthetic interplay between cover versions and original tunes. And while Lightbody and Spencer Yaras’ screenplay is full of discourse on music, they are also negotiating their own creative process as they try to settle on a form conventional and crowd-pleasing enough to give their audience what it wants, yet original enough to stand out from the competition and to find its own chops. There are lots of ridiculous set-pieces – including a cameo from co-director Steinmiller as a homeowner so chirpy he fails to notice the blood and bone splattered all over his cabin and guests – and despite all the gleeful gore and bodily destruction, this is the very opposite of mean-spirited, and ends with the wholesome suggestion that any band, once it finds its own voice, can always get back together.
strap: Release me: in Chris Lightbody and Robert J. Steinmiller Jr.’s directorial debut, a possessed ‘song-a-ling’ machine makes compromised musicians sing to its deadly tune
© Anton Bitel
