Rating: C
Dir: Laa Marcus
Star: Harley Bronwyn, Justin Michael Terry, Alison Iles, Geri Courtney-Austein
Bride-to-be Jamie (Bronwyn) is having a bachelorette party with her three besties at a very swanky San Diego house, where everything from the lights to the locks are controlled by an app. Their intended weekend is crashed first by unexpected squatter Charlie (Terry), and then Pete, the boyfriend of Evie (Courtney-Austein), who just so happens to moonlight as a male stripper. These are barely an inconvenience, compared to the subsequent discovery of Pete’s corpse in the bathtub – after looking at first to be merely an unfortunate accident, this turns out to be foul play. Making matters worse, a power outage leaves the residents sealed in, and just before finding the body, they ingested some psychedelics provided by Charlie.
What unfolds here is part chick flick and part whodunit, though neither element is taken particularly seriously. For example, Jamie begins to wonder how things are connected to a film script on which she had been working, with certain elements of events appearing to mirror her story. Yet once the drugs kick in, it’s hard to be sure of her objective reality – for instance, she also keeps seeing a caricature of her teenage self, “Lamey Janie”, around the house. This aspect is rather inconsistently handled, since for the other characters we are left on the outside, watching them trip. It’s about as entertaining as observing someone else take drugs usually is, i.e. not very.
The pharmaceuticals do go some way to explaining the questionable choices made by the quintet as the night wears on. On the other hand, it still feels as if the script has to work a little hard to make the story happen. Almost everything in the entire movie takes place in the single location of the house, and by the end, it feels a tad contrived. For instance, the “no cell signal” conceit is dubious. You can get away with that if your location is genuinely a wilderness. I’ve been to La Jolla; it’s clearly not in the middle of nowhere. I read another review, which compared it to a Scooby-Doo episode. The reference was intended positively, yet there are aspects here which could be said to involve meddling kids.
More positive are the characters, and this is impressive, because the early signs weren’t good – too much high-pitched shrieking for my tastes. Once things settle down though, the roles become well-defined, and you could believe these are real people, stuck in a bizarre situation. Evie was my favourite, going from humping the corpse to avoid its discovery by Jamie’s policeman fiance, to holding a seance so the gang can contact the ghost of the previous occupant. It was a shame when she exited the plot, and I think my interest dropped perceptibly thereafter. The eventual solution to the mystery does seem to make decent sense. To be sure though, I’d likely have to watch this again with that knowledge, and it’s perhaps telling, I’m only slightly interested in doing so.
The film was released on Amazon and other platforms yesterday.