Coming in a little late again this week. Frankly, I forgot what day of the week it was because life is barely maintained chaos and time is an illusion. So let’s get on the horse and see where it drinks, or whatever.

This week we’re hitting another brand new Tubi Original that just dropped on February 16, titled Prey for the Bride. The film is classified on IMDB as a “TV movie”, written by Bryan Dick and directed by Danny J. Boyle (who is not Oscar winner Danny Boyle), two people whose credits show a long history of “TV movies”. It stars a bunch of working-class actors you likely have never heard of, and one who you absolutely should know.

The plot summary from Tubi goes like this: “a group of friends at a bachelorette party are stalked, tortured and murdered by a masked figure, who forces them to face a long-buried secret.” Short and to the point.

My spoiler-free thoughts: if you had told me someone crossed a basic cable TV murder mystery with a bloody slasher film, I would have never expected it to work, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t one of the best-written slashers I’ve come across in a while. It doesn’t do anything new or unique, but its plot kept me guessing all the way through, with red herrings on top of red herrings, and a climactic reveal that was so obvious but had never crossed my mind. The story behind the killing is a little more soap opera drama than I typically care for, but the effectiveness of the mystery was more than enough to get me through. 4/5 Skulls.

This is where the spoilers come in, so if you want to see the movie first, go do that now.

OK, here comes the plot. *deep breath* The movie opens with a lady named Kimi getting dressed up for some kind of fancy occasion, but she is promptly stabbed to death by someone in a red hoodie and a wolf mask before she can leave the house. Then we find ourselves at a party where Greg proposes to Jordan, whose college besties Brooke, April, and Lauren are also present. Then Dorit arrives, who has been Jordan’s BFF since childhood but didn’t go to the same college so she feels like a fifth wheel a lot of the time. Everybody is happy for Jordan’s engagement, but also cautious, because Jordan was not too long ago engaged to Holden, who killed himself and burned his house down when he got caught cheating on her. It turns out Kimi was also one of Jordan’s college crew, and it was this party she was getting ready for when she was murdered. After getting the news, the rest of the ladies go off to a home in Napa owned by Brooke’s family for a sort of hen’s weekend before the wedding. Weird things start happening, like pictures of Holden and Jordan mysteriously appearing, and the questions in a party game getting replaced to be about Jordan and Holden. Seems someone thinks Jordan’s friends had a hand in breaking up her engagement, which ultimately led to Holden’s death. And that’s when the slashing and the red herrings start. A lady who works for Brooke’s family shows up mysteriously but then gets murdered. The limo driver who brought them out starts taking voyeuristic spy photos but then also gets murdered. One of the hired catering servers at the house shows up out of nowhere while one of the ladies (Lauren or April, can’t recall which) is on a walk, but then he gets murdered and thrown off a cliff. At one point Brooke and Dorit, who don’t like each other, begin to suspect each other, and each one has a plausible argument. Even Jordan’s fiance Greg shows up towards the end as a possible last-minute reveal, but it’s not him, either. You guessed it: murdered. Eventually, we learn that Jordan’s friends were involved in splitting her up with Holden. They planted fake evidence of infidelity on him, leading to the end of their engagement and, ultimately, his death. It even seems like the killer might be Holden, who never really died in the fire. So who is under the wolf mask? Well, turns out it’s the other catering server, Seth, who is secretly Holden’s brother, that none of them recognized because he was wearing a masquerade-exatype mask while working. Seems like a pretty cheap last-minute reveal, right? Except that’s not the big finish, because it turns out Jordan herself has been the mastermind all along. She knew what her friends had done and brought them all together to exact her revenge. Dorit tries to fight back and Jordan is accidentally shot in a struggle over a gun, and Seth also dies in there somewhere. Brooke escapes but Dorit is the only survivor, and the last thing we see is her telling the cops Seth acted alone so nobody will ever know what Jordan had done. The end.

I know that’s the longest plot summary I’ve done in this series so far, but I felt it was necessary to illustrate how layered and nuanced this script is. When I list all of those red herrings, I want you to know that each one was presented in a very plausible, almost convincing way. The only thing that stopped me from biting too hard was that we all know the big reveal never happens up front. But then there was even a moment where I felt like they had put us on to Brooke, then swayed us away, only to bring it back around to her. And then when it is revealed that Jordan masterminded the whole thing, I honestly felt a little silly, because it was so obvious once it was out in the open. But the story was so well written and paced that I just never stopped to consider it. I was especially fond of the wardrobe choice of a red hoodie for Wolf Mask, which serves in retrospect to foreshadow the big reveal of Jordan, a Little Red Riding Hood play on a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

I mentioned earlier that there was one actor you should know after this, and it’s Megan Peta Hill, who plays Jordan. Don’t get me wrong, the rest of the cast was perfectly capable and did fine jobs. Hill gets an opportunity none of the others get, though, which is to have a complete change of character during the film’s climax. And I tell you, she made that shift with gusto, but not cheese. It was almost like a split-personality performance. Jordan the beleagured bride-to-be, and Jordan the murder mastermind, are two completely different people. Facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language all change. It was an awesome bit of acting to watch play out.

I also appreciate how the story ends. Seth, of course, has to die, and does. Jordan has to die, too, but that it happens as an accident while Dorit is simply trying to disarm her is appropriate. And then when it’s over, and everyone is dead but Dorit, with nobody left to contradict her (foreshadowed just minutes earlier when Brooke tried to kill Dorit), protects the memory of her best friend. Because even though she knows what Jordan did was wrong, Jordan is also already dead. And even though it was wrong to kill for revenge, Dorit also kinda understands how Jordan got there. So in the end, she protects the memory of her friend, who she lost to tragic circumstances. Great finish.

Like I said, no reinventing the wheel here, but way better than a soap opera slasher should have been. Good bloody violence and kills, but nothing too extreme for the squeamish. Go check this one out!