Body Count is a horror anthology from 2026. There are, of course, many flicks by that name, so it might be easy to get confused when you search for it. The stories are loosely connected via this character—Malvolia: The Queen of Screams. The actress, producer, writer, and director portraying her—Jennifer Nangle—also seems to have a significant part in every short story jammed together by this narrative. So she’s part presenter of each episode, yet also a part of it. Furthermore, there is a storyline in the presentation too, something that binds it all together.
Body Count is quite obviously a low-budget movie. I have no idea about the size of the budget, though, how much the actual cost to make it was. Often you can hear it in the sound production. I have seen movies where I literally cannot hear the dialogue or where the sounds of gunshots sound like someone is hitting a can. Where the sounds of an axe cutting through flesh just sound like someone putting back a spoon in a marmalade jar. Body Count stays away from those obvious telltales.
The other thing you usually notice right away is the cinematography and the editing. Obviously a lower budget means you have fewer cameras to film an event from different angles or a limited time to do the scene. Meaning that you don’t have the luxury to go all in like Stanley Kubrick and make a hundred takes of each shot. Hence, there is less material to work with in postproduction. This in turn means that you might have to settle for less than perfect shots, and the actors might seem less than great from time to time.
Body Count suffers a bit from this. Since there are multiple stories, the quality fluctuates a bit between segments too. That is to be expected. It’s difficult to maintain a steady feel over multiple stories where different directors and writers have been involved. Each one has their own vision of how their ideas are meant to be envisioned. It also varies quite a bit in the same episode, especially actor wise. Sometimes they’re really good, and sometimes, well… not so good.
But it’s not possible to pinpoint it to certain actors either. The same actor or actress can have some splendid takes and, in the next scene, be performing in another style altogether. This is something that most low- and shoestring-budget films have in common, so it’s nothing special for Body Count.
Body Count is a horror comedy, though. And that’s a saving grace. I usually don’t really like horror comedies where the terrifying feel has been lost for some cheap humor. But I think that is the thing that makes Body Count work. It’s obvious that the filmmakers didn’t intend to make a top-notch splatter film with gruesome and totally believable gore and special effects. I think they had the intention of making a fun movie. A fun movie to make and a fun movie to watch. If you have a little bit of experience with movies, you’ll get the obvious spoofs right away and understand why certain scenes are heavily overacted. That’s part of the deal.
The stories seem to mostly concentrate on the revenge of women who have been degraded or humiliated in the past. Many of them feature a story where something awful has happened in the past. It might be someone being drugged with GHB and taken advantage of, or a high school girl gang that humiliated the one girl that only wanted to hang with the popular girls. It’s actually very relatable. There are also both vampires and werewolves and the immortal demons hosting the whole thing.
But I must admit that I lost interest after a while. Body Count is over 100 minutes, and I think maybe 30 minutes of that is too long. It’s just impossible to stay focused for that long. It has some charm, no doubt, but it still needs to have a little more nerve than Body Count could deliver.
