‘MURDARITAVILLE’ (2024) – Movie Review

I never thought I would see a horror comedy inspired by the music of Jimmy Buffet, but here we are. Murdaritaville is a film following a group of friends being killed off by a half-bird creature who kills people who aren’t big enough fans of Jimmy Buffet.

Synopsis

A group of trop-rock fanatics on their way to an impersonator contest start getting killed off by a half-man, half-bird.

Murdaritaville was directed by Paul Dale (Killer Kites) from a script written with Dylan McGovern (Silent but Deadly). The film stars Austin Naulty (Sewer Gators), Carter Simoneaux (Killer Kites), Heather Campos (Dream House Nightmare), Dylan McGovern, and Jenna-Fracis Duvic (Southlandia).

When I saw the trailer for Murdaritaville, it got me super excited because the bird man reminded me of the Troma classic Poultrygeist. I was hoping for some low-budget gory mayhem. Did Murdaritaville deliver that?

Not really.

We don’t see the creature till the 30-minute mark of the film’s 49-minute runtime. Once we do get the creature, most of the kills are fairly tame or offscreen, which was pretty disappointing.

That being said the film as a whole does have some things going for it. The creature’s makeup is pretty cool looking and the mannerisms and noises the creature makes go well with the look of the makeup to make an interesting performance. The cast is really solid and has great chemistry. The jokes, more often than not, land. The film is pretty funny, with many one-liners and references to Jimmy Buffet songs, like a drunk character talking about how everything is “my own damn fault.”

I enjoyed the way the story was told as flashbacks and how the story didn’t always line up and it went back and showed you what happened to explain away the inconsistencies. There was also a “neighbor behind the fence” gag that was pretty great, especially him saying he got under the fence by entering the brown hole. I feel the film works much better as a straight comedy and tribute to Buffet’s work than it does as a horror comedy.

Final Thoughts

Murdaritaville is a horror comedy that’s light on horror and high on comedy. While the film’s horror elements are fun, they arrive too late in the film and are too tame to really make much of an impact. If taken as a straight comedy with minor horror elements, it’s a solid way to spend 49 minutes as it kept me laughing.