In short: The Jokesters (2015)

A bunch of total pricks has a pretty successful YouTube channel where they “prank” people, where “prank” is defined as cruel bullying that’s excused with a good old “just joking”.

One among their number, Ethan (Dante Spencer), seems to want to leave the fold of four guys who’ve brought out the shitty little boy in one another since Junior High, just now marrying a guh, a guh, a girl named Gabrielle (Jen Yeager) and secretly planning to move to Colorado (which I assume is as far away as possible without leaving the country).

The three remaining friends, particularly the clearly deranged Nick (Nathan Reid), plan to end their show with a bang, by ruining the wedding night of their supposed best friend. For reasons said wedding night takes place in a cabin in the snowy woods that belongs to one of the guys’ fathers, so things are well set up to spy on the couple via hidden cameras, don skull masks and have fun with axes. Would you believe that things don’t turn out terribly well?

There’s the core of pretty interesting little horror film hidden away in AJ Wedding’s The Jokesters. That imaginary film would use thriller elements and tropes of the POV horror sub-genre to examine destructive male friendships, why it might be not a good idea to stay together with every idiot one has outgrown, and how basically sane people can push one another into the extreme corners of being assholes.

Unfortunately, this film is buried under masses of filler and drudgery. The first forty minutes in particular are bordering on torture, seeing as we the audience spend them with four complete assholes that incessantly act the part, and then again, and again, and again. Fun fact: I got it after the first ten minutes, and could have lived without the film’s repetition of this basic fact about its characters. This directly leads into the film’s next problem, characterisation that doesn’t actually give any of the people in whose fates we as an audience are supposed to be interested in any character traits beyond being obnoxious and horrible. Well, Nick is apparently “not Mexican”, and the other dudes like their racist and sexist jokes, but that’s it when it comes to characterisation. Basically, these assholes are assholes.


Things don’t improve much once the plot sets in, for the supposed twists and turns never feel anything but random – not least thanks to that lack of depth in the characterisation – and what I believe is supposed to be dramatic escalation never grabs at all.