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Karen: The Beauty Queen Butcher is EXACTLY what you think it would be.
Karen The Beauty Queen Butcher might be the best worst movie you see in 2026
Wicked Horror is probably the only publication that will give Karen: The Beauty Queen Butcher a positive review. Heck, we might be the only publication that doesn’t excoriate it as totally irredeemable AI slop trash, for that matter. And we’re proud of that; love it or hate it, truly independent horror productions like this one deserve some kind of acknowledgement, and even a little bit of admiration for trying when “success” was never really an option in the first place.
Now, I’m not saying that Karen: The Beauty Queen Butcher is necessarily a “good” movie. But it’s certainly an above average one, and a film that was WAYYYY better than I thought it would be. My expectations for this film were so low, ants were tripping over them — so imagine my surprise when I actually found myself LIKING what I was watching here.
Karen: The Beauty Queen Butcher comes to us from director Zachary Snygg. That doesn’t sound like a real name, but it probably is. If you’re a dude who makes movies with titles like Mad Maxine: Frisky Road and Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell for a living, “Snygg” is pretty much the perfect last name. I’m sure you could pronounce it 100 different ways and it still sounds wrong all 100 times.
Of course, Snygg has been in the indie filmmaking game for decades now. As in, his directorial oeuvre goes all the way back to the late 1980s, although for the bulk of his career he’s used a plethora of pseudonyms, including Z. Winston Brown and John Bacchus. Frankenthug, Kinky Kong, Who Wants To Be An Erotic Millionaire, Girl Explores Girl: The Alien Encounter … all his handiwork, in some capacity or another. And even if you’ve never seen anything directed by Snygg, you’ve probably heard of at least one of his movies before, if only because it’s a lock for all of those lazy “worst movie titles of all time” listicles — 1989’s The Bloody Video Horror That Made Me Puke on My Aunt Gertrude.
Through absolute dumb luck I did manage to stumble onto Snygg’s last movie — 2024’s The Cigarette — a year or two ago. I actually kinda’ liked it; it’s a movie about a woman who unwittingly causes Armageddon in New York by distributing a buncha insanity dust-laced smokes to random people outside of basketball courts and skate parks. Fittingly enough, the star of that film — the inimitable Jasmin Flores — is also the titular Karen of Karen: The Beauty Queen Butcher. And it only takes about five minutes for this movie to firmly establish itself as a maniacal, blood-splattering slasher comedy, complete with preposterously gory special effects that don’t even try to look realistic and believable most of the time. Imagine Tom Savini directing a live action Itchy and Scratchy movie and it would probably look a LOT like Karen: The Beauty Queen Butcher.
Flores was pretty much born to be a no-budget horror movie queen. She looks like a version of Felissa Rose adopted by the Kardashians and her accent is absolutely indescribable. Like, it’s a combination of every single Latin American country and every single Eastern European country at the same time. If all of the Planeteers from Captain Planet were amalgamated into a single character, I’m guessing it would sound a lot like Flores’ actual speaking voice.
Now, you might have some assumptions about Karen: The Beauty Queen Butcher based on the title alone. And yeah, most of those assumptions would be totally accurate. But there’s actually some surface level political and social commentary going on here. Case in point? The titular character’s last name is “Mangione,” and you better believe that becomes a talking point at various points throughout the movie.
This might come as a shock to you, but a movie called The Beauty Queen Butcher is indeed about beauty queens getting butchered. Or more accurately, beauty queen contestants, but now we’re just picking at nits. One of the great creative choices of the film is that it doesn’t play the guessing game for very long. Indeed, you find out who the mad slasher of the movie is pretty early on and without giving away too much of the story, let’s just say we’ve got more than one or two major twists in the narrative. Well, calling them “major” is probably too much, but at least they tried to shake things up here.
The ensemble cast is pretty weird but mostly effective. Since most of them are destined to get sliced and diced into mincemeat, I suppose you can forgive the film for keeping the characterizations pretty shallow and one dimensional. This is the kind of movie where a woman’s taste in eyeliner pretty much becomes their core personality trait — not that it matters that much in the long run, since 95 percent of the cast exits the film in pieces. But we do get some relatively solid performances here, including the one from Scott Bolger as Karen’s incredibly forgiving husband. As soon as he starts reading The Vagina Monologues, though, you kinda know the inevitable is inevitable.
The controversial thing about this movie is bound to be its gratuitous use of A.I. fill-in. And yeah, this movie uses a LOT of A.I. backdrops, which are almost immediately identifiable as ChatGPT-spawned glop as soon as they pop up onscreen. I’m not 100 percent sure that some of the background actors and even some of the gore effects were A.I., too, but that would explain the comical, physics-defying surreality of certain scenes. I’m not going to moralize too much about the use of artificial intelligence in films — especially negative budget movies like this one — but it’s quite noticeable and distracting. Like, subconsciously you just sense that something is “off” and if it’s instantly recognizable in a multi-million-dollar commercial, it’s definitely going to be apparent in a film this cheaply produced.
Despite some misgivings, I still found myself enjoying Karen: The Beauty Queen Butcher. It’s not a film that pretends to be great art, or even mediocre art. It’s a movie that just kinda exists that seems like it would be one of the worst things you’ve ever seen in your life, but when it’s all over you’re just like “well, that might actually be moderately above average for what it is.”
And yes, that is a compliment, however backhanded it may sound.
