'F Marry Kill' Annoys Rather Than Captures Your Heart

There’s an art to making direct-to-video features. Proper compensation for the inherent lack of scope in these projects is what separates the Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning’s from the Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power’s of the world. Take something like CarousHELL 2. Who needs elaborate crowd shots when director Steve Rudzinski supplies viewers with imaginative spectacle like a gay sex scene between a carousel unicorns and a German man? Similarly, Stalked by My Doctor: Patient’s Revenge provided the creative apex of the Stalked by My Doctor saga in delivering unexpected and entertainingly bizarre homages to La La Land and Audition. These titles flourish when they lean into creatively deranged material that their bigger-budgeted contemporaries can’t indulge in.

Unfortunately, F Marry Kill, a new film from director Laura Murphy and Buzzfeed Studios, does not make CarousHELL 2 or Patient’s Revenge proud. So little entertainment is provided here that it becomes glaringly apparent how empty all the streets and restaurants in this fictional universe are. Minimal resources only exacerbate the problems in an already poor script.

Ivan Diaz, Dan Scheinkman, and Meghan Brown’s script begins with Eva Vaugh (Lucy Hale) turning 30 years old at a shindig with best friends Kelly (Virginia Gardner), Anthony (JayR Tinaco), and Robin (Bethany Brown). While blowing out the candles on her cake, Eva laments wasting her 20s. After all, she spent it trapped in one unfulfilling relationship. This new decade belongs to her and specifically her libido. It’s time to take risks. Oh, and having sex, that’s also crucial. Too bad that ambition coincided with a local murderer known as The Swipe Right Killer preying on young women.

Worse yet, some of the sexy guys she’s started seeing, like Mitch (Brendan Morgan) or Norman (Samer Salem), have characteristics (namely a shoe size of 10) pointing towards them as the Swipe Right Killer. As if modern dating wasn’t touch enough, amirite?

When a movie’s especially unengaging, one’s mind tends to wander like Bill Bixby at the end of an average Incredible Hulk episode. In the case of F Marry Kill, my brain kept fixating on how weird it is that this script makes the idea that any potential man on these dating apps could be a serial killer a “surprise.” Save for her third-act refutation of a male jogger declaring “#NotAllMen,” Eva treats the concept of random men being potentially hostile as some ludicrous notion. That’s why she’s so initially vulnerable to getting all chopped up by The Swipe Right Killer.

However, that’s so removed from how women actually navigate the real world. Every woman I know (including yours truly) is always talking about how every dude on the street could be the next Ted Bundy or Brett Kavanaugh. That’s the tip of the iceberg concerning F Marry Kill’s detachment from reality circa. 2025. The thoroughly generic script seems specifically rooted in 2016 with its fixation on new-fangled dating apps, “nice guys” terminology, true crime podcasts, and dialogue mimicking the quippy style of Joss Whedon’s Avengers movies. If this dropped the same weekend as San Andreas in 2015, F Marry Kill might’ve received threadbare brownie points concerning relevancy. In 2025, it might as well be from another planet. A script that thinks “spanking” is the epitome of kinky sexual exploits doesn’t have a chance of resonating with modern viewers.

Not helping matters, too, is how badly F Marry Kill fumbles as a comedy. Even basic jokes like Eva saying, “I am not going to the police [for help]” before cutting exterior police station shots fail thanks to poor timing and clumsy editing. There’s also an overabundance of tired self-referential quips about “villain monologues” or any character’s inexplicable behavior. The result is a motion picture where everyone sounds the same yet nobody’s lips deliver especially humorous lines. Lucy Hale meekly shouting “EVIDENCE!” while plopping a plastic bag on a police precinct counter isn’t a recipe for tickling the funny bone.

F Marry Kill doesn’t work on any level, whether it’s as a comedy, a “fun sexy time”, as some treatise on technology, or even as a darker thriller. Because there’s no blood or guts in this feature (all the Swipe Right Killer’s slayings happen off-screen), there’s not even some maximalist carnage ripped straight out of The Monkey to alleviate the feature’s tedium. The only time F Marry Kill finds any kind of rhythm is a combined 30 seconds of footage where Eva and Mitch’s rapport together functions as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for certain viewers.

In these fleeting images, Mitch is a kindly soul decked out in abs gladly volunteering to cook Eva dinner and listen to her troubles. For viewers who’re the subject of the Bo Burnham song “White Woman’s Instagram”, these brief stretches of F Marry Kill might hit the spot as an opportunity to live vicariously through a fictional figure. Beyond that, the project is a washout. Most of the runtime otherwise concerns the most grating quips imaginable and a tedious mystery plot.

Compounding all of these flaws is a constrained scope and glaringly obvious reminders of F Marry Kill’s limited budget. My personal favorite is how the swanky eatery Mitch owns has about as many people on a Friday night as an Applebee’s at 2 in the afternoon on a Tuesday. CarousHELL 2, Stalked by My Doctor: Patient’s Revenge, and 2024’s best movie Hundreds of Beavers epitomized that low budgets do not have to equal underwhelming cinema. After all, no amount of money could liven up a feature as dreadful as F Marry Kill. Though clearly not a movie you’d want to either wed or bang, this title isn’t even worth killing. Just leave it on read.