Another Hole in the Head Film Festival 2024 Coverage
Tie Die review
A horror comedy whose horror is sparse and whose best comedy is unintentional.
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
Tie Die
Directed by Morgan Miller
Written by Morgan Miller
Starring Joe Bob Briggs and Lloyd Kaufman
Tie Die Review
Whenever I open a movie review by expressing the goal of this website to find value in the films we cover…you pretty much know it’s not going to be a positive review. You’re going to get some lemons. That’s the nature of the beast. The point is that anyone who creates something has done something special. Getting to share that creation with the world is a miracle. All movies have value. … Yeah…this one is that bad.
Tie Die, much to my chagrin, is not the story of a killer cravat. I went into the screening unaware of what Tie Die was about…but I was secretly hoping for a bad horror comedy about a necktie that strangles people who wear it. I thought about this a lot while watching the movie. To be clear it’s not being docked points for failing to live up to the version of a bad horror comedy that I created in my head as a play on the film’s title. But the movie I got rarely lived up to that purposely bad concept in any way.
No…Tie Die is about a possible killer bear in the woods. Which is a better idea for a feature film than a killer tie…I’ll grant you. But that’s on paper. In practice…Tie Die isn’t about anything. Sure, it has…things in it. There are hippies and drugs and a musical performance. A Joe Bob Briggs cameo. Lloyd Kaufman as a park ranger. Murder. If this all sounds perfectly fine…on paper it all is. In practice…yikes.
But let’s start with the positive. We like to find the value, after all. The reveal of what’s happening to these campers has some interesting, and dark, moments. While they don’t fit the tone established by Tie Die at all…they are the clear highlight of the movie. A genuine pathos intruding upon a long, boring stream of nothing. The budget doesn’t allow for elaborate kills…but the uncaring manner in which the characters we’ve been following are dispatched carries a genuinely fascinating feel to it. There is also a decent musical performance shoehorned in. One suspects to pad the runtime.
Most of Tie Die is spent following a small group of campers. Nothing interesting happens to them. They have nothing entertaining to say. I’d estimate the entire first half of the story, save for a cold open with an initial kill scene, is spent wandering around the woods with these people. They are told to leave the park following what appears to be a bear attack. They pick up a hitchhiker. Talk about drugs and music. Nap. Swim. Nap some more. It is tedious.
So little happens in Tie Die that you find yourself playing a guessing game of who was actually together when they shot a scene. It suffers from some brutal cuts back and forth between people whose eyelines don’t appear to be on the same planet. The audio hasn’t been balanced so each new shot is tonally out of sync. I’m almost convinced that Joe Bob Briggs sent his performance in from a separate location, and they just worked around it. “Worked” may be the wrong term here.
These things can be forgiven…we’ve all seen low-budget movies before. But you have to have something to care about. Displaced campers debating whether to take magic mushrooms for a half hour isn’t it. Even if those mushrooms end up being surprisingly relevant to the part of Tie Die that does work. The failure ultimately lies in the film’s inability to be the slightest bit funny. Lloyd Kaufman saying that he thinks he might have shit himself…twice..is not funny. But it’s as close as Tie Die gets to a laugh.
Look, all movies have value. I’d even argue that Tie Die has a sequence interesting enough to find a clip of on YouTube one day. It feels like it’s from a completely different movie…but it is a genuinely decent horror scene. There’s a psychotic feel to it that is worthy of attention. For the most part, however, Tie Die meanders through the West Virgina woods. Looking for music and laughs…while only finding one instance of the former.
Scare Value
The only laughs to be had in Tie Die involve trying to figure out who was actually on set together from shot to shot. There is a somewhat interesting slasher story happening here. Unfortunately, it is put on the backburner for far too long. Instead, Tie Die leaves us wandering lost in the woods with its paper thin characters and failed attempts at humor.
