Read @ Joe’s

Title: Stupid Games (2024) Director: Nicolas Wendl // Dani Abraham Writer: Tanner Adams // Nicolas Wendl // Dani Abraham Studio: Sandaled Kid Productions IMDb Plot: A girl’s discreet attempt to assess her one night stand and his friends takes a deadly turn when she and her roommates host a dinner party where they unknowingly unleash a malevolent force. Joe Says: This is dark, claustrophobic, and zings with voyeuristic dialogue. Co-directors Wendl and Abraham have truly conjured some simple, fun magic.

Dinner parties can be murder. What to wear? Who to bring? Is the right food paired with the wrong wine? Next thing you know an incantation is cast and a killer demon is sprung loose. Or at least, this is what happens in the indie horror film Stupid Games. 

Written by Tanner Adams and co-directed by Nicolas Wendl and Dani Abraham, Stupid Games is a short, slick story about trying to possess what you can’t have, while attempting to reap before you’ve sowed. The movie is dark, claustrophobic, and zings with voyeuristic dialogue. 

Jaxon (Saad Rolando) and Rex (Gage Robinson) are two dude-bro Millennials who need a third partner in order to attend a dinner party with the promise of a lip-smackingly good dessert. Stuck with handyman Stanley (Grant Terzakis), the trio wine and dine with Celeste, Riley, and Mia. Yet before the good times can roll, the lights go out and Celeste wants to play a game: Quest for Truth. With each roll of the dice, an eerie zen hits the room that is part Wishmaster soaked in saki with a seventies-style seance rave all retro fitted into something as compact as an app. The game begins and players begin to divulge personal matters not normally discussed over wine and crudités. Then things start to go bump in the night. And this stupid game soon becomes one of life and death. 

Wendl and Abraham let the characters grow through well-placed and 2020s-relevant dialogue. Meek and mild Stanley and Mia might not be what they initially seem while Rex’s Bradley-Cooper frat boy spin is exactly the same on both sides of the coin. Edited by Wendl, the camera stays tight on the characters and the dance the girls play. While most of the characters teeter between merely-annoying and highway-accident grotesque, the dialogue and act between them is interesting. And refreshing. Wendl and Abraham have truly conjured some simple, fun magic. 

Perhaps the only counter argument to Stupid Games is that the actual horror is a little slow in coming. For a dinner consisting of carryout, the main entree is a slow cooking brisket. Yummy once you get there but the anticipatory wait is patience inducing. Again, good characterization helps make the time slip away – as do the Evil Dead rattling cabinet callouts. 

Wendl and Abraham make good use of their reported 10k budget with believable sets, undiscovered actors, and a creepy score that goes beyond a synth temp. Stupid Games shows the juxtaposition between friendship and selfishness when it comes to playing the game with the opposite sex. Quite often enough, there is hell to pay.