Film / Vicious Fun

Joel: Who are you?

Carrie: I'm the one who's going to kill every one of those sick fucks.

Vicious Fun is a 2020 horror comedy written and directed by Cody Calahan, starring Evan Marsh, Amber Goldfarb, and Ari Millen.

After a night of heavy drinking, Joel (Marsh) accidentally infiltrates a support group for serial killers. When he's found out, one of the members (Goldfarb) reveals that she's an assassin who targets serial killers, and now must protect Joel while completing her mission.

Also, it takes place in 1983. Cue the neon lights and synth soundtrack!

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Vicious Fun provides examples of the following tropes:

• Affably Evil: Bob is always an upbeat guy, even when blood is involved. His dance sequence is also a treat.

• Bad Liar: Joel barely stumbles through his fake backstory when he has to pretend to be a serial killer, and it falls apart the moment Bob starts asking questions. He gets better at it in the coda.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. Carrie looks pretty rough after being stabbed by Bob and the subsequent blood loss.
• Berserk Button: You don't insult a man's mustache, especially around 1980's cops.
• Blood Knight: Carrie seems to enjoy stabbing people a little more than is strictly necessary to get the job done.

• Creepy Good: Joal qualifies, as Carrie points out trying to record Bob and play it back for Sara would have firmly put him in 'creepy guy' territory, regardless of his genuine feelings for Sara.
• Covert Group: Carrie works for a "top secret" organization. She never elaborates.
  Joel: Like the government?
  Carrie: No.
  Joel: Is it kind of like a government-
  Carrie: I've already said too much.
• Damsel out of Distress:
  • Sarah wanders into the police station, oblivious to the fact that it's been taken over by serial killers. Luckily, she knows self-defense and has no trouble laying out Fritz when he tries to attack her.
  • She doesn't hesitate to hit Bob with her car. For someone who has no idea what's going on, she's kind of a badass.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Carrie doesn't go into details, but she tells Joel that someone she loved was murdered by a serial killer when she was a child. This set her on the path that's she's on now. That, and The Organization

• Disc-One Final Boss: Zachary is the head of the group and is played by David Koechner who is the most established named actor in the movie. Despite seemly being set up as he main villain of the group, he is killed off fairly quickly by the other members of the group after he insults them. Ultimately Bob is the real main villian of the movie.
• Dogged Nice Guy: Joel, to Sarah. Carrie helps him see the error of his ways.
  Carrie: You can't force a person to feel something or trick them into loving you. You're not entitled to that...okay, so now you feel stupid. It's a good first step.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Zachary thinks he's better than his fellow killers and makes his feelings clear. It doesn't end well for him.
• Drunken Montage: Devastated that Sarah has no romantic interest in him, Joel goes on one. He passes out in a storage closet and wakes up surrounded by serial killers.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: Joel has one after becoming Carrie's "intern," styling his hair like hers and growing a goatee.
• Eye Scream: Carrie finishes Bob off by stabbing him through the eye with a scalpel, it gets stucks and when Bob removes it while dying, it comes off along with his eyeball.

• Expy: Mike is a expy of the many slasher movie villains of the 80s right down to the fact he primiarly targets either camps or college houses.
  • Bob has some elements that echo back to Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.
  • Fritz preference for dressing like a clown, along with his creepy laughter, brings the Joker to mind.
• Good Is Not Nice: Carrie never cracks a smile (except when she's killing), but her motives and actions are all in service of stopping serial killers.
• Gorn: And how. Arms and fingers get cut off, someone is disemboweled, heads get caved in, and more than one eye gets stabbed. Honorary mention to Hideo, who is strangled to death by another man's intestines.

• Gotta Kill Them All: Carrie keeps a notebook on her full of kill lists organized by state. She's currently working her way through Ohio.
• Good Is Dumb: The useless cops certainly are. When they're not aggressively posturing to control their prisoners, they're lazy, mean, and obstructive.
• Genre Savvy: The movie lampshades and plays with tropes common to popular slashers like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and even American Psycho, sometimes turning them on the serial killers.
• Jump Scare: In universe, as Bob gets one from Fritz right after brutally murdering someone. A serial killer jumping from the old "flashlight under the face" prank is a pretty meta joke for the genre.
• Master of Disguise: Bob.
• Mistaken Identity: It never occurs to the group that a non-killer would wander into their meeting, so when Joel stumbles out of the supply closet they all assume he's Phil, one of their members who is running late. The real Phil never arrives — Carrie already killed him.
• Mundane Solution: Joel pulling the fire alarm actually works for half a minute, if it had scared off the serial killers. Bob just had quicker wits (and that dogged sense of fun.)
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Joel harbors some misogynistic, "nice-guy" ideas about women (especially his roommate Sarah), but he's small potatoes compared to the serial killers.
• Porn Stache: All of the three cops sport one of those. When Bob disguises himself as a police inspector, he also wears a fake one that, when Joel tries to point how it's obviously fake, one of the cops go berserk due to him "disrespecting another man's moustache".
• Poor Communication Kills: Joel says all of the wrong things in order to get Sara to hang up on him, right after behaving exactly like a creepy jerk would. This ends up putting Sara in danger as she does genuinely care for Joel, and comes to help him out of jail.

• Retirony: Invoked out of nowhere by the police chief, who says he hopes he doesn't drop dead because "I'm the only one my stepdaughter can rely on."
• Serial Killer: There are quite a few here.
  • Zachary is a former government agent, fired because his operations were routinely "messy." He gleefully tells the group about the time he poured ricin into a village's water supply. In particular, how much he enjoyed hearing their screams through the night.
    Zachary: I like when it gets messy.
  • Fritz, the evil clown, injects his victims with a paralytic so that they're aware and helpless of everything he does to them. He tends to focus on one victim, keeping them on life support for months before a final, sadistic kill.
    Carrie: Also, he dresses up like a clown.
    Joel: Why?
    Carrie: *shrugs* he just likes clowns.
  • Hideo is a chef who specializes in human flesh.
  • Mike, an expy of classic slasher villains from the '80s, talks wistfully of committing mass murders at summer camps and sorority houses.
  • Bob is a pick-up-artist who kills his targets between the first and third date. He gets a thrill out of outsmarting his victims - after Joel and Carrie are jailed, he makes sure he gets some alone time to tell them just how aroused he is by their predicament.
    Bob: I am rock hard right now. *points to Carrie* See you later.
  • Carrie is technically one, though she only targets other serial killers and shows no interest in hurting anyone else. In fact, she goes out of her way to protect Joel, an innocent bystander.
• She Who Fights Monsters: It could be that Carrie's trauma as a child turned her into a serial killer, she's just been trained to use her urges to hunt other serial killers, which is a shoutout to Dexter.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Carrie's preferred method of killing: why stab someone once when you can stab them until your arm gives out?
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Bob, who is intelligent, physically attractive, and the most outwardly charismatic of all the serial killers. Carrie even mentions that he's the only one of the group who's capable of functioning in polite society.