Tubi’s October event “Terror on Tubi” comes to a close with one last new movie, though after watching A Party to Die For, you’ll likely feel underwhelmed. Maybe even misled. Of all the Tubi Originals to premiere during this sacred month of scares, Nanea Miyata‘s is the most removed from the horror genre, largely because it’s not a horror movie. The line between a horror movie and a thriller often blurs, all thanks to shared styles, ambiguous rules, and filmmakers who want the best of both worlds. A thriller can be just as scary when placed in the right hands, and a horror movie can center itself around a mystery. In the case of A Party to Die For, this is a thriller that fails to thrill, much less horrify its audience.
Miyata pens a familiar tale here. Someone is seduced by the danger of a new scene and crowd, only to then fall into a bad situation. The unlucky fool at the center of the approaching dilemma is Sadie (Jonetta Kaiser, Vampire Academy), a down-on-her-luck shopgirl working in her cousin’s high-end boutique after getting into some trouble with the law. Having grown up with none, Sadie is naturally fixated with money. Hence why she’s so drawn to a rich man named Owen (Jermaine Rivers), and why she gets mixed up with socialite Jessica (Kara Royster).
Sadie isn’t going to see a windfall of her own anytime soon, so being near money is the next best thing. That is until Jessica turns out to be more trouble than she first let on. A Party to Die For slightly defies expectations by not having Owen be anything other than a nice, if not too trustworthy, love interest. He unknowingly provides the venue for murder. Owen lets Sadie stay at his place while he’s away on business, and around Halloween, Sadie invites Jessica and her posse over for an afterparty under the illusion that she herself is rich and owns this house. Sadie, drunk and disoriented, then watches Jessica kill someone in cold blood.
Kara Royster, “A Party to Die For”
A Party to Die For briefly shows its darkly funny side once Sadie wakes up to Jessica cooking breakfast only feet away from a fairly fresh corpse. Now, if there was ever a point where the movie could have completely shifted gears, this would have been it. Rather than go down the standard route of hiding the evidence and avoiding the law — which is what this movie ends up doing — Miyata could have made a scathing character study about Jessica as both a killer and an entitled socialite. There is a hint of that idea in what the director and writer ultimately did, but it gets overshadowed by the coverup aspect, not to mention sterilized.
Even if this isn’t a horror movie, there should still be some thrills. Bludgeoning the victim with a tchotchke was as exciting as A Party to Die For ever gets, though. Everything else from here on out is either dull or limply handled. There is no tension to be found, even as the detective character (Shay Guthrie) closes in on her suspects in between multiple jogging sessions. The topic of guilt comes up (as it should), but the story doesn’t do much with that, either. This thriller is just shallow in every respect.
Minutes after watching, you’re likely to forget this movie. A Party to Die For feels so unenthusiastic about itself that you’ll end up echoing the sentiment. Kara Royster is truly the only source of real energy here, as well as the one thing keeping this tedious thriller moving. The original offerings during this year’s Terror on Tubi were overall lackluster, though in retrospect, they seem a bit more appealing now.
A Party to Die For is now streaming on Tubi.
Jonetta Kaiser, Kara Royster, Jermaine Rivers, “A Party to Die For”
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