In Salem Massachusetts, Siblings Billie (Natalia Dyer), Marcus (Asa Butterfield), and Jo (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) spend the night together as their mother works a night shift in the wake of their father having left their family. Jo finds a strange knife and journal in a ruined house as if it was beckoning him, and after clearing it off to reveal an inscription a sinister force takes hold of Jo who insists others play variations of children's games with deadly consequences.
All Fun and Games comes to us from producers the Russo Brothers through their company Gozie AGBO which co-produces the film with British company Anton (behind last years Choose or Die). The film is the feature debut for writing and directing duo Ari Costa and Eren Celeboglu following a handful of short films between the two of them and Costa having worked under the Russos in various capacities including Second Unit work on Avengers: Endgame and Extraction. All Fun and Games seems like it's the kind of horror film that serves as a small scale showcase of what relatively first time filmmakers can do, and unfortunately as a showcase it's not all that impressive and fails to elevate the rather underwhelming material.
All Fun and Games from the opening which has a flashforward to events at the end of the film has the feeling of something that might've been pared down from what it was initially supposed to be, especially since Natalia Dyer's character Billie feels like she's kind of been wedged into this forced narrator position that just feels really awkward and the movie runs at only about 69 minutes not including credits. While I can't say for certain, All Fun and Games has all the signs of a troubled production down to even Keith David having been announced as having a role in the film but does not appear in the final product. The actual material is very standard "cursed object" fare much in the same way as Anton's Choose or Die used the same format (and Asa Butterfiled) last year, but where Curse or Die wound up being in my opinion bad in a funny way, All Fun and Games is just bad in a unremarkable and tired way. The movie features a large number of flashy edits that call attention to themselves as well as jump scares involving screaming and "in your face laughing" which is when it hit me that the movie feels like a revisit to that late 90s early 2000s era of horror filmmaking with stuff like Feardotcom, Soul Survivors, or Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows that eschewed building horror or atmosphere in favor of aggressive editing that executives thought would cater to the "MTV Generation", so in a way All Fun and Games was a little like visiting an old friend (only to remember why you lost that friend's number in the first place). Most of the actors do what they can with the material, but there's so little to the very stock roles their given that there's very little any of them can do. Asa Butterfield unfortunately has to spend a good chunk of the runtime being the main antagonist and the voice he's been directed to do feels like he's doing a bad impression of Brad Dourif by way of Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance but at least it's more dignified than we he had to regurgitate Betamax tape in Choose or Die. If there's a lesson to be learned here, it's that Butterfield probably shouldn't make any more horror films with Anton.
All Fun and Games is a turgid and generic horror film that isn't scary or interesting in the slightest and feels like the kind of generic product that'll be destined to take up the back corners of streaming services alongside other mediocre and substandard horror offerings you've already forgotten about. If you must seen an Anton produced horror movie, just watch Choose or Die because at least it's unintentionally funny.
