Six college best friends throw their own private graduation party that goes terribly wrong when an uninvited guest arrives. Five years later, the girls gather once again and endure a night of far more horror and bloodshed.

There’s something about harboring a dark secret that seems to attract mask-wearing homicidal maniacs to people like moths to a flame. Did you, and/or by extension your friend-group, cause and cover-up the untimely death of another person at some point in your past? If so, then you should expect a costumed killer who has an affinity for pointy-objects to accompany the guilt and regret you’re already struggling with. For reference, see Prom Night, The House on Sorority Row, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, and most recently, The 6th Friend.

The 6th Friend is a female-driven, whodunnit slasher in the vein of I Know What You Did Last Summer and the 2009 remake Sorority Row. Five years after their drug-fueled college graduation party that went horrifyingly wrong, six friends attempt to rekindle their friendship at a remote cabin in the woods, only to discover that they’re being targeted by a killer intent on punishing them for the sins of their past. While this feels like familiar territory, director Letia Clouston and her co-writer/lead actress, Jamie Bernadette, are able to cook up a thoroughly entertaining, albeit flawed, tongue-in-cheek slasher film.

One of The 6th Friend’s strongest assets comes in the form of its talented cast. Co-writer/star Jamie Bernadette is given the heaviest lifting as the film’s protagonist, Joey. She makes for an engaging lead, imbuing her character with equal parts brooding, vulnerability, and toughness. But while Bernadette is the clear-cut lead, the film makes sure each of the friends has her moment to shine. All of the women here show strength and agency, which is both commendable and undeniably satisfying. Particular praise should be given to Monique Rosario, who gives her character a refreshingly quiet and focused demeanor once the horror starts. She’s the fighter of the group and gets to have some badass moments that are pretty damn crowd-pleasing if you ask me.

It also helps that The 6th Friend has humor that actually works. It’s refreshing to see a low budget horror comedy that makes its humor feel organic rather than forced and over-the-top. The chemistry and interplay between the sextet of friends—who all manage to balance being both catty and caring quite well—is where the film truly shines and is what endears the audience to its characters. While there are times when the film will let a joke take precedence over pacing or story development—there’s a sequence involving the word “bitch” that goes on for longer than it probably should—the humor works well enough that these issues can be forgiven or overlooked.

Where The 6th Friend begins to stumble is in the pacing department. The film is a murder mystery in which the murder mystery part of it plays out over the span of about 30 minutes.

It never quite finds the right tempo and vacillates between progressing too slowly and entirely too quickly. The first half only slightly teases the notion that we’re watching a horror film before the second half sends the film into full-blown-slasher-mode and wipes over half of the cast in only a handful of minutes. Almost nothing happens, and then everything happens, and while that kind of jarring switch can be effective if done correctly, here, it ends up feeling muddled.

The awkward pacing also hampers the horror parts of the film. There are some decently effective suspense sequences—including a fun callback to the car-lock sequence in Scream—and the film makes use of some good practical f/x. But for the most part, the horror sequences here feel rushed. The scares are rarely given the proper amount of build-up to truly hit the audience, and the deaths happen so quickly that they don’t deliver the impact that they should. This doesn’t stop the film from being fun and entertaining, but with better pacing and weightier scares, this could have been a truly wild thrill ride.

While The 6th Friend may not quite live up to its potential, it still manages to be an entertaining and endearing film nonetheless. If anything, it certainly establishes Letia Clouston and Jamie Bernadette as talented indie-horror filmmakers who show promise and potential and who you should keep an eye out for.