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(Fright Fest UK 2026) BAD KARAOKE Hits all the Right Wrong Notes...and Some Butts Pay the Price

By. Professor Horror

There is a very specific dread reserved for karaoke night, the dread of being handed a microphone in front of people who will remember exactly how badly you butchered "Total Eclipse of the Heart" for years afterward. BAD KARAOKE (which premiered at FrightFest London) takes that low grade social terror and does something almost too obvious in hindsight: it hands the microphone actual killing power. It is a dumb movie built around an even dumber concept, but for a midnight festival screening, that is not necessarily a bad thing.

The film opens in 2012 with the kind of drone shots that usually promise a Nicholas Sparks adaptation: a quaint little town, doo-wop drifting over the soundtrack (a fittingly on the nose needle drop of "I Only Have Eyes For You"), everyone gathering at Jerry's, the local dive bar, for karaoke night. The young, the drunks, and even a priest are all in attendance, which tells you everything you need to know about how small this town is and how little else there is to do in it. There is a word for what happens when an inanimate object seems to look back at you with something like intention, pareidolia, and BAD KARAOKE leans hard into it from the jump. Its karaoke machine (later revealed to answer to the name Song-a-ling) is rigged with a face built entirely out of buttons and red lights, and it is unmistakably, almost comically evil. A shocking, eye-popping accident cuts the good times short before the opening scene is even finished.

Years later, the story picks up with a wedding cover band on the road and stuck killing time in a town that offers almost nothing else to do. The lineup includes bandleader Hannah (Kat Cunning), her new girlfriend Ava (Jenna Karan), Logan and his best friend Matt, and Emily, the keyboardist who ends up finding the machine in the first place, with Noah rounding out the group. Naturally, they end up back at Jerry's, and naturally, Emily spots the karaoke machine still sitting in the corner. The bartender's reaction is the film's best early gag: rather than warn them off in any useful way, he simply looks terrified at the mere mention of karaoke and all but shoves the machine into their arms, encouraging them to take it back to their rental house instead of explaining why an object should never leave that building. Everyone in the town already knows the machine is evil, so leave it up to the outsiders to unleash the carnage. 

What follows is a haunted house movie that happens to also be about performance anxiety. Once the band settles into their rented house, full of the drugs, drinking, and hookup energy you would expect from a group of musicians with a night to kill, the machine activates on its own and starts assigning karaoke tracks at random. It rates each performance, and if you sing badly enough, it lets you choose your own method of death. The film treats this less like a slasher stalking its prey and more like a survival game, closer in spirit to something like Game of Death than to a conventional haunted object movie, and there is a real thematic charge underneath the gore: a possessed karaoke machine punishing people for being bad singers is, whether the film says so outright or not, a pretty pointed joke about a culture that would rather watch someone badly cover a hit than take a chance on something original. The film gets a surprising amount of mileage out of that tension between karaoke and creation, between performing someone else's song because it is safe and putting something of your own on the line.

Not every FrightFest entry manages to turn a promising premise into something that actually lands. McKinley Gray digs into where ITHAQUA loses its nerve, examining how a folk-horror premise about starvation, isolation, and a flesh-hungry winter spirit never quite closes in the way it should.

None of this comes wrapped in particularly tight plotting, and the character interactions can feel a little forced, the kind of dialogue that exists mainly to get everyone into position for the next kill. But that looseness ends up working in the film's favor rather than against it. Directors Chris Lightbody and Robert J. Steinmiller Jr., making their feature debut together, give BAD KARAOKE the loopy, unbothered logic of an idea hatched sometime after last call, and the film never once apologizes for that. This is, bluntly, a movie best enjoyed the same way you would enjoy actual karaoke: with a drink in hand, low expectations for quality control, and a willingness to let the bit be the point. The songs are recognizable, the kills are inventive and increasingly outrageous, and the film's commitment to treating exploding body parts and full musical numbers with equal seriousness is, in its own scrappy way, kind of admirable.

BAD KARAOKE will not convert anyone who finds the entire concept of karaoke unbearable, and it occasionally reaches for a joke that lands more mean than funny than it probably intended. But as a midnight festival curiosity, it delivers exactly what it promises: gory, funny, a little sloppy, and genuinely fun to sit through, especially if you go in already a few drinks deep. Sometimes the scariest thing in the room really is just handing someone a microphone.

The characters in BAD KARAOKE aren't the only artists at this year's festival finding out that inspiration can bite back. Professor Horror takes a closer look at BIG BABY, where a blocked screenwriter's masked creation starts writing him back just as much as he's writing it.