When the Bit Goes on Too Long (and Then Keeps Going)
Studio 666 is the kind of movie that starts as a goofy inside joke and then somehow becomes a 100-minute feature because no one in the room felt brave enough to say, “Dave, maybe this should stay a skit.” On paper, it sounds like deliriously fun nonsense: the Foo Fighters play themselves, move into a cursed Encino mansion to record a new album, and Dave Grohl gets possessed by a demon and starts murdering his bandmates. In practice, it’s like being stuck inside a 14-year-old metalhead’s notebook doodle—bloody, loud, and kind of funny for a bit, until you realize there’s no actual story under all the “wouldn’t it be cool if…?”
The Setup: Band, Mansion, Demon, Repeat
We open in 1993 with the metal band Dream Widow being killed off in gloriously over-the-top fashion: broken jaws, hammer to the face, skulls crushed, and the frontman Greg Nole hanging himself after the carnage. It’s pure splatter, and honestly, it’s not a bad opener if you’re into gore and don’t mind the characters having the lifespan of fruit flies.
Then we jump to 2019 and the Foo Fighters, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, struggling with writer’s block. Manager Jeremy (Jeff Garlin) pressures them into making a new album, and they end up in the same cursed house used by Dream Widow. You’d think an industry veteran might skip the murder mansion, but apparently real estate is tough even in Hollywood.
From there, the movie’s structure is simple enough to be written on a napkin:
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Dave gets creatively obsessed.
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Dave finds creepy basement and “evil objects.”
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Dave listens to cursed demo tape.
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Dave gets possessed by Dream Widow demon.
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People start dying in Looney Tunes levels of gore.
Unfortunately, that napkin is basically the structural blueprint for the entire film. There’s not much escalation or surprise—just a series of kills loosely strung together with jokes, riffs, and whatever came to mind between takes.
Dave Grohl: Charisma vs. Screenplay
Dave Grohl is naturally likable, and he absolutely leans into the role of demonic frontman with everything he’s got. He mugs, he snarls, he eats bandmates, he shreds guitar solos like his life—and theirs—depends on it. You can tell he’s having fun.
The problem is, the movie seems to think “Dave is having fun” is the same thing as “this is working.” Watching Grohl gradually succumb to possession should have some emotional or comedic arc, but instead it’s just:
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Scene 1: Dave’s blocked and stressed.
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Scene 2: Dave hears cursed track, gets weird.
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Scene 3 onward: Dave is 90% demon and 10% “guys, we just need one more riff.”
He goes from “my creative process is intense” to “I’m eating Chris Shiflett’s corpse in the yard” with very little transition, and the movie never decides if it wants us to be horrified, amused, or just admiring the practical effects. It ends up feeling like a stretched-out SNL sketch where everyone forgot to write the punchline.
The Band: Cannon Fodder With Instruments
The rest of the Foo Fighters—Taylor Hawkins, Pat Smear, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiflett, Rami Jaffee—are charming in that “we’re musicians, not actors, please be gentle” way. But the script doesn’t give them much to do besides banter and die in increasingly ridiculous ways.
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Shiflett gets his face grilled and his neck stabbed.
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Rami Jaffee dies mid-sex scene via chainsaw-through-the-bed, which is about as subtle as it sounds.
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Hawkins is pressured into finishing the cursed song and is then partially decapitated with a cymbal, which might be the most on-the-nose “drummer death” gag ever put to film.
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Nate Mendel gets stabbed in the eye and run over by a car.
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Pat Smear’s head is flattened under a rolling vehicle.
It’s all cartoonishly gory, which is fine, but because none of the bandmates are fleshed out as characters beyond “Dave’s guys,” their deaths land more like punchlines than anything else. And not particularly sharp punchlines at that.
Tone: Horror-Comedy… But Mostly “We’re Just Goofin’”
The toughest thing in horror-comedy is balance. You need genuine stakes and scares, plus laughs that don’t completely undercut the tension. Studio 666 mostly settles for “look, we know this is dumb.”
We get goofy supporting characters like:
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Will Forte as Darren, the desperate delivery guy trying to hand Dave his demo tape before being decapitated with hedge clippers.
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Whitney Cummings as Samantha, the neighbor who knows way too much about the mansion’s history and acts as exposition with a wine glass.
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Leslie Grossman as Barb, the real estate developer with sinister vibes and a shocking amount of patience for these idiots.
There are also cameos from Lionel Richie and John Carpenter because… why not, apparently. It all screams “wouldn’t it be cool if” energy, and to be fair, sometimes it is cool. But most of the time, the humor feels like throwaway improv: “say something funny” rather than actual jokes with bite.
The Plot Twist You Can See From Space
The big “twist” is that the possession and killings were all part of a scheme by manager Jeremy and developer Barb, who orchestrated the whole “record in the cursed house” thing to create a killer album—literally and figuratively.
So the demon is banished, the Dream Widow souls drag it to hell, and then: surprise! Capitalism was the real evil all along. Jeremy survives long enough to pitch Dave on his solo career, and Dave backs down from killing him because the album’s going to be a hit.
It’s meant to be satirical—“the music industry will sacrifice you to grind out product”—but the execution is so blunt it may as well be written in blood on the wall: ART BAD, SALES GOOD, TRUST NO MANAGER. By the time we jump to a year later and see Dave about to perform solo, still marked by demonic possession, the movie’s trying to say something about fame and ego. Unfortunately, at that point it’s hard to care; the story is just limping toward its end credits.
The Gore: Practical, Abundant, and Weirdly Boring
You’d think a movie packed with decapitations, disembowelments, split bodies, and crushed heads would be hard to call boring. Yet here we are.
The kill scenes are elaborate and lovingly crafted, but the movie treats them like the only toy in the box: whenever the energy flags, it just throws another gnarly death at the screen. Without rising tension or escalating insanity beyond “this one’s messier,” the impact dulls. It’s like being repeatedly jabbed with the same joke in slightly different packaging.
“Yes, the chainsaw kill is outrageous.”
“Yes, the cymbal decapitation is inspired in a very “final-destination-drumline” way.”
No, it doesn’t make up for the drag between set pieces.
The Biggest Problem: It Thinks Being In on the Joke Is Enough
The whole movie operates on the assumption that awareness = cleverness. “We know this is cheesy. We know the acting is rough. We know the plot is dumb. That’s the point!”
Except that being self-aware isn’t a free pass. You still need pace, structure, and jokes that land more often than they splat. Movies like Shaun of the Dead or What We Do in the Shadows work because they actually commit to character and story, even as they riff on genre. Studio 666 mostly commits to the bit: “we’re a band making a horror movie about our band making a horror album.”
If you’re a die-hard Foo Fighters fan, that might be enough. You get to watch the guys goof off, bleed out, and play meta versions of themselves. If you’re not? It’s a long way to go for a premise that never really evolves past the first paragraph.
Final Verdict: One Cursed Demo Tape Out of Five
Studio 666 could have been a tight, gleefully stupid 80-minute romp with killer gags and a fun, nasty edge. Instead, it’s an overlong vanity project with occasional flashes of inspired gore buried under uneven jokes and a story that feels like it was written in the margins of a tour schedule.
It’s not unwatchable, and there are moments where you can’t help but grin at the sheer silliness of it all. But for a movie about creativity, horror, and demonic possession, it’s weirdly lacking in all three where it counts.
In the end, the real curse of Studio 666 isn’t the haunted mansion. It’s realizing halfway through that you’re basically watching the world’s most expensive behind-the-scenes DVD extra that someone accidentally released as a feature film.
