Directed and co-written by Zachary Snygg—known for his work on Zombiez—Karen the Beauty Queen Butcher arrives as an ambitious attempt to blend the slasher subgenre with the rapidly evolving frontier of artificial intelligence.
The film centers on Karen (Jasmin Flores), a woman whose singular obsession is achieving fame through beauty pageants. This — and the fact that she never has sex with him — creates friction in her marriage to her long-suffering husband, Ted (Scott Bolger). As Karen tirelessly pursues the crown, a masked serial killer begins targeting her pageant competition. The mystery unfolds as these murders inadvertently clear the path for Karen’s rise, eventually forcing the story to confront who is behind the mask and what drives this violent pursuit of perfection.
The most defining characteristic of this movie is its heavy reliance on AI-generated imagery. If it was too expensive to film, the filmmakers went straight to AI, using it to populate the world of the film, from cityscapes to large crowd scenes. Remember how the birds flew in a pattern in Birdemic? Here, you’ll see the background extras repeat their motion and even have multiple clones all around them, creating a dreamlike—or nightmarish—aesthetic.
And the kills! Woah, the kills. These sequences are highly stylized bursts of computer-generated nonsense, leaning into a cartoonish level of violence. Whether it’s a water balloon implant becoming a makeshift weapon or the surreal destruction of a hairbrush strike, bodies are just breakable objects filled with oceans of blood and non-anatomically correct muscles, sinews and veins. It looks like Alvaro Passeri-level insanity but without the practical effects.
I wonder, if Bruno Mattei or Herschell Gordon Lewis had been making movies today, would they be making movies that look like this? Are we being too hard on films that use techniques like this? I would assume they’d also do edgelord-level stunts like naming their killer Mangione.
It’d be so much better if it were 70 minutes long or less. That said, it’s 100 minutes plus and by the time the first killer is caught, sent to jail and killed, you’d think the movie was over. I did like the scenes with the detectives, and Karen herself is wonderfully bitchy. But by the end, you’ll start to wonder, “Would someone really be able to rip a face off like that?”
Sooner or later, every movie is going to look like this, but better. I mean, I hope better. But this creates an uncanny — what’s the furthest and deepest part of the uncanny valley, asking for a friend — valley effect where everything is the same, all the same background players, blood that geysers from wounds as fingers are sliced off and suddenly reappear.
I’d prefer it if they just did what Lewis did on Blood Feast: Go to a butcher, buy lamb guts and use them for a week. Soak in Lysol so they don’t stink too bad. It honestly was probably horrifying to even be around all those mutton innards, but it still looked a million times better than this.
Also: This is the only slasher I’ve ever seen with a flutophone kill.
You can watch this on Fawesome.
