Bad Karaoke

There are horror concepts so wonderfully absurd that the title alone almost sells the movie, and Bad Karaoke belongs squarely in that category. Co-directed by Chris Lightbody and Robert J. Steinmiller Jr., from a screenplay by Chris Lightbody and Spencer Yaras, this American horror comedy imagines an old karaoke machine with considerably higher standards than the average drunken bar crowd: sing into it and your performance may become a matter of life and death. The filmmakers have joked that the inspiration came from years of enduring painful karaoke performances that nearly put them in an early grave, and that mischievous observation gives the movie its personality. Premiering at Tubi FrightFest in London on August 30, 2026, Bad Karaoke feels almost genetically engineered for a festival audience: loud, bloody, knowingly ridiculous and sufficiently affectionate toward both horror and music that its central joke survives far longer than it reasonably should. The surprise is that beneath all the splatter, there is also a rather sincere movie about musicians who have learned to live with the distance between artistic dreams and everyday reality.

The story announces its intentions with an appropriately gruesome prologue involving Melissa, played by Kate Miner, an isolated bar and a seemingly harmless Song-a-Ling karaoke machine. Years later, keyboardist and songwriter Emily, played by Lexi Underwood, is travelling with her fellow musicians from Oregon toward California, where the group has accepted the decidedly unglamorous prospect of playing a wedding. A stop at a dive bar leaves them with the unwanted machine, which Emily brings to their rented house as entertainment. This is precisely the sort of decision that characters in horror movies have been making since somebody first suggested spending the night in a suspicious cabin, but Bad Karaoke understands the cliché and has fun with it. Once the microphone comes out, the rules begin revealing themselves in increasingly unpleasant ways. A performance is no longer an opportunity to embarrass yourself in front of friends: the machine judges its singers, and failure can produce spectacularly terminal consequences. Even more amusingly, discovering the apparent rules does not necessarily mean understanding them, allowing the screenplay to repeatedly pull the rug from under characters who believe they have found the loophole that will keep them alive.

What prevents this premise from becoming an 84-minute sketch is the smart decision to make the victims musicians rather than simply assembling another collection of interchangeable twenty-somethings at an isolated rental property. Emily, bassist Noah, played by Case Walker, and band leader Hannah, played by Kat Cunning, already possess a history together, complete with creative disagreements, professional frustrations and the tiny resentments that develop when people spend too much time travelling and performing alongside one another. Consequently, their chemistry matters before the machine starts reducing the headcount. Lexi Underwood gives Emily an appealing mixture of uncertainty and stubborn creative ambition, while Case Walker brings a relaxed comic quality to Noah. The standout, however, is Kat Cunning, whose musical confidence gives Hannah an immediately credible stage presence. Because several members of the cast can genuinely perform, the karaoke scenes never feel like disposable pauses between murders. They become part of the movie's identity, blurring the boundary between horror comedy and an exceptionally deranged backstage musical.

That musical dimension also gives Bad Karaoke an unexpectedly playful relationship with nostalgia. Karaoke itself is an oddly democratic form of entertainment: talent is optional, enthusiasm is generally compulsory, and humiliation is always waiting somewhere near the chorus. Chris Lightbody and Robert J. Steinmiller Jr. exploit that universal anxiety beautifully. Anyone who has watched an overconfident stranger seize a microphone at midnight will understand why transforming a karaoke machine into a supernatural executioner feels less arbitrary than it initially sounds. The soundtrack avoids simply becoming a procession of the most predictable karaoke standards, although the appearance of Haddaway's “What Is Love” provides exactly the kind of infectious recognition that can turn a festival screening into a communal event. There is an amusing contradiction at the centre of the film: these characters are supposedly threatened by “bad” karaoke, yet some of the performances are genuinely good. That discrepancy gradually becomes important because the machine's judgment is not quite as straightforward as pitch, technique or showmanship, giving the concept enough mystery to sustain the escalating carnage.

And carnage there certainly is. Bad Karaoke understands that nobody buys a ticket for a movie about a murderous singing machine hoping for restraint. The deaths are exaggerated, grotesque and frequently hilarious, operating according to the cheerful bad taste of splatter cinema rather than attempting realistic terror. The opening establishes the filmmakers' willingness to go for a visual punch, and subsequent sequences keep searching for new ways to connect musical performance with bodily destruction. The practical appeal of these moments is crucial: the film has a polished appearance beyond what its deliberately trashy premise might suggest, yet it never becomes embarrassed by its B-movie DNA. There is something pleasingly old-school about watching an everyday piece of technology become inexplicably malevolent. Horror has given us killer televisions, telephones, computers, cars and toys; in retrospect, a homicidal karaoke machine was simply waiting for someone to plug it in. The movie's best sequences embrace that simplicity rather than drowning it in mythology.

Curiously, the film becomes less assured when it decides that the Song-a-Ling requires a deeper emotional explanation. The final act investigates the origins of the curse and introduces ideas about creativity, authorship and the value of making something genuinely your own. These themes are more thoughtful than one might expect from a movie in which singing badly can result in extravagant dismemberment, and there is real affection behind them. Yet the tonal transition is noticeable. After establishing such a buoyant rhythm of songs, jokes and gross-out deaths, Bad Karaoke temporarily asks the audience to invest in tragic history and heartfelt conversations. The ingredients are individually effective, but the modulation between them is not entirely smooth, and the supernatural mythology feels less developed than the characters surrounding it. Certain resolutions arrive conveniently, while a few questions are better left unanswered than examined too closely. The emotional material nevertheless gives the film something many high-concept horror comedies lack: a reason to care about who survives beyond simply waiting to discover the next inventive kill.

That imperfection ultimately suits Bad Karaoke. Chris Lightbody and Robert J. Steinmiller Jr. are not trying to reinvent supernatural horror; they are taking one ridiculous question seriously enough to build an entire movie around it. Their feature debut was shot in Los Angeles in March 2025 before making its world premiere at FrightFest the following year, and its combination of independent ingenuity and crowd-oriented filmmaking is evident throughout. Even the festival setting seems unusually appropriate. Horror festivals have developed their own peculiar affection for late-night karaoke, making a FrightFest screening of a movie about homicidal karaoke feel almost like programming destiny. The film knows exactly what happens when genre fans gather in a room ready to laugh collectively at something outrageous, and many of its biggest moments have clearly been constructed with that response in mind. More importantly, its characters remain surprisingly likeable. Rather than immediately collapsing into the hostility so common in cabin-style horror, this group continues behaving like people accustomed to functioning as a band, even when their most pressing gig has become surviving until morning.

Bad Karaoke therefore emerges as a modest but immensely amiable horror comedy whose enthusiasm compensates for the occasional flat note. Its supernatural logic could be tighter, its emotional third act could blend more naturally with the manic splatter surrounding it, and viewers allergic to extended musical performances may occasionally wish somebody would simply unplug the machine. Yet Lexi Underwood, Case Walker and especially Kat Cunning give the film warmth and musical credibility, while Chris Lightbody, Robert J. Steinmiller Jr. and Spencer Yaras understand that a concept this silly only works if everyone commits to it completely. The result sits somewhere between supernatural object horror, gross-out comedy and an affectionate celebration of people who continue making music even when stardom has passed them by. It may not hit every note, but it has personality, memorable kills and the rare ability to make an audience simultaneously want to sing along and stay very far away from the microphone. For a movie called Bad Karaoke, that sounds suspiciously like a successful performance.

Bad Karaoke
Written and directed by Chris Lightbody, Robert J. Steinmiller Jr.
Produced byChris Lightbody, Brendan Petrizzo, Robert J. Steinmiller Jr., Spencer Yaras
Starring: Lexi Underwood, Case Walker, Kat Cunning, Kate Miner, Jenna Karan, Robert J. Steinmiller Jr., Aris Alvarado, Jonathan Jason Green, Justin Miner, Bianca Castronovo, Michael Chubb, Korama Danquah, Kevin Clayette, Joe Eddy, Greg Uberuaga, Patrick Arbanas Lightbody
Cinematography: Tommy Oceanak
Edited by Cori Wapnowska
Music by District 78
Production companies: District 78, Father Greg Productions
Distributed by:  NC
Release dates: August 2026 - Tubi FrightFest, United Kingdom
Running time: 83 minutes

Viewed on August 22, 2026 (Tubi Frightfest 2026 press screener)