If John Waters and Ed Wood had a love child who was raised in a decrepit San Francisco movie theater and fed a steady diet of bad espresso and Fangoria magazines, that kid would grow up to make All About Evil. Written and directed by Joshua Grannell — a man who loves horror movies so much he apparently decided to kidnap one, stab it to death, and parade the corpse around for applause — this film is a black comedy that’s supposed to skewer the cult of celebrity and the obsession with gore. Instead, it mostly skewers your patience.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of a thrift-store Halloween costume: fun to look at for a minute, then itchy, cheap, and falling apart at the seams.
🎭 The Premise: Murder, She Screened
Natasha Lyonne stars as Deborah Tennis (yes, like the sport — a name that sounds less like a movie villain and more like a chain-smoking suburban tennis coach). Deborah runs a failing theater in San Francisco that looks like it’s been condemned since Nixon resigned. One night, after an argument with her mother about selling the place, Deborah stabs Mommy Dearest to death — which, in this universe, immediately qualifies her for auteur status.
The murder gets accidentally screened for a live audience, who mistakes it for a short film. The crowd goes wild, because apparently people in this universe are so desensitized that actual homicide gets five stars on Letterboxd. Deborah realizes she’s onto something — snuff films are the new art-house! So she becomes a homicidal Ed Wood, turning her victims into “films” that she screens for her growing cult audience.
Imagine Sunset Boulevard rewritten by someone who’s never seen a movie without a decapitation in it, and you’re halfway there.
🩸 The Style: Grindhouse Meets High School Drama
Grannell clearly loves old horror films. You can tell because he never lets you forget it. The whole movie is drenched in retro camp — think Rocky Horror by way of CSI: San Francisco. The theater setting has charm, the costumes are gloriously tacky, and the lighting screams “stage play directed by someone who just discovered red gels.”
But here’s the problem: loving grindhouse cinema doesn’t automatically make you good at it. The film mistakes homage for execution. Every scene is a wink, every death a reference, every moment of dialogue a campy self-own. It’s not horror with humor — it’s horror as karaoke.
When Deborah starts making her “films,” they’re staged with all the artistic subtlety of a high school senior project. There’s one where she plays a Victorian queen decapitating a woman’s breasts with a guillotine. It’s supposed to be shocking. It’s mostly just confusing. You sit there thinking, “Is this supposed to be feminist commentary, or did they just run out of fake blood and ideas at the same time?”
🤡 The Acting: Over-the-Top and Under-the-Influence
Natasha Lyonne is… something. She brings her trademark raspy voice and unhinged energy, but somewhere between her nervous laughter and her eyeliner, you start to wonder if she’s playing a character or just trying to make rent. Lyonne channels Bette Davis, Tura Satana, and possibly a malfunctioning ventriloquist dummy, all at once.
Thomas Dekker plays Steven, a teenage horror geek who idolizes Deborah, and he does it with the wide-eyed sincerity of a puppy watching its first slasher flick. He’s there to represent “the audience” — the horror fans who confuse violence with vision — but he mostly looks confused, like he wandered onto the wrong set and decided to just stay there.
Cassandra Peterson (yes, Elvira herself) plays Steven’s mother, which is a great bit of casting… until you realize the movie doesn’t do anything with her. She’s there to say things like, “Horror movies rot your brain,” while surrounded by actors whose performances prove her right.
And then there’s Jack Donner as Mr. Twigs, the theater projectionist who helps Deborah commit murder. Donner acts like he’s been waiting his entire career to play a homicidal janitor, and honestly? He might be the only one here who understands the assignment.
🔪 The Plot: Blood, Boobs, and Brain Fog
The movie wants to be a satire of fame, fandom, and the commodification of violence. But every time it starts to say something interesting, it immediately gets distracted by its own reflection in the blood puddle.
Deborah’s descent into madness is supposed to mirror Hollywood’s obsession with fame at any cost. But instead of psychological unraveling, we get literal unraveling — of intestines, mostly. She kills her mom, her co-worker, a random bathroom guest, and a handful of theatergoers, all while filming it for her “cult classics.” Her audience keeps coming back, because apparently San Francisco’s horror community in this movie is composed entirely of deranged Yelp reviewers.
By the third act, the movie has turned into a full-on murder carnival. Deborah plans a finale involving cyanide-laced punch, a live snuff broadcast, and an audience that literally cheers for death — because subtlety is for losers. The entire theater erupts into chaos, characters die like extras at a B-movie explosion sale, and Deborah meets her end in a rooftop showdown where a teenager calls her a hack. She dies not from blood loss, but from criticism.
Honestly, that might be the most accurate depiction of a director’s ego in film history.
🎬 The Direction: Drag Show Meets Death Wish
Joshua Grannell (a.k.a. drag performer Peaches Christ) deserves credit for making something this aggressively weird on a shoestring budget. The problem is that All About Evil feels like it was made by someone who couldn’t decide whether to parody Pink Flamingos or audition for American Horror Story.
Every scene is exaggerated to the point of exhaustion. The kills are goofy rather than gory, the tone is self-congratulatory rather than subversive, and the humor leans so heavily on irony that it collapses under its own smugness.
The film wants to be both love letter and autopsy — a tribute to exploitation cinema while dissecting its audience’s bloodlust. But instead of a scalpel, Grannell uses a chainsaw, and by the end, there’s nothing left but noise and viscera.
🍿 The Message: Fame Kills, But So Does Boredom
Underneath the blood and bad wigs, there’s an idea here — that our appetite for violence and celebrity is endless, that we’d rather watch someone die than see a theater close. But the execution is so clumsy that the movie ends up embodying the very thing it’s mocking: an empty spectacle dressed up as social commentary.
By the finale, Deborah’s cult followers are guzzling poison like it’s movie popcorn, the twins are stabbing each other in slow motion, and you’re left wondering if anyone behind the camera was sober during the editing process.
And yet, there’s something almost endearing about how All About Evil fails. It’s a deeply sincere kind of failure — a blood-soaked valentine to horror nerds everywhere, written in Sharpie and desperation.
💀 Final Thoughts: Death by Camp
All About Evil wants to be All About Eve meets The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but ends up feeling like Drop Dead Gorgeous directed by your goth friend who just discovered fake blood and Final Cut Pro. It’s loud, messy, and thinks it’s smarter than it is — like a film school thesis that got infected by rabies.
There’s fun to be had here if you love camp, chaos, and watching Natasha Lyonne go feral in a corset. But if you’re looking for actual scares or coherent satire, you’d have better luck finding subtlety in a bucket of entrails.
Final Verdict: 2 out of 5 bloody reels — a movie so in love with bad cinema that it accidentally becomes one.
