Rating: E
Dir: Luke Bond
Star: Anna Acha, Eva Simone Frazier, Mara Michelle, Noam Shapiro
Oh, dear. The cover for this seemed to back up the synopsis, which read as follows: “While vacationing away from the city, recent college graduates face the dangers of white supremacists lurking in the rural territories of the United States.” Sounds kinda interesting. Except that is not the movie we actually get. The “dangers” don’t actually show up until there is barely 20 minutes left before the end credits. Until then, you are stuck in the seventh level of hell: the extended company of people who think buying a Trump-baby balloon is the peak of humour.
We begin with a flashback to Jasmine (Acha), celebrating her eighteenth birthday. As a “present,” her father, a former Black Panther insists she shoots at targets of Klansmen; she initially refuses, before finally giving in. Four years later to the day, she’s turning 22, and her room-mates Angelique (Frazier) and Shanan (Michelle) throw her a party. That’s where the balloon shows up. They then head off into the wilds with their various boyfriends, spare wheels and others for a getaway. Despite the obvious liberal tendencies of everyone on view, they’re heading deep into Trump country, pausing only to steal a yard sign and replace it with their balloon. Yeah. You’ve not just lost one-third of your audience at this point, you’ve also lost all the people who don’t watch action films to be reminded of the shitty, tribal state of American politics right now. /raises hand.
But it gets worse. Much worse. For just before the half-hour mark, we get one of the most cringe-inducing scenes I can remember, in which the characters sit around a campfire, and smugly agree with each other about identity politics (above). This goes on for ten minutes, I kid you not, spouting ActBlue talking points like “America can’t own up to its own sins, because it has financial interest in propagating those sins further.” It feels like being trapped in an endless /r/politics circle-jerk. Oh, hang on, that’s redundant. /r/politics is an endless circle-jerk. There’s the token “not every single Trump supporter is a racist” line – only it’s negated because, here, every single Trump supporter does turn out to be a racist. This is my unsurprised face.
By the time the promised “face the dangers” showed up, it almost felt like a positive development, because it stopped the characters from spouting dialogue copied from a bad episode of The View. There is a brief moment of moral quandary for Jasmine, who has to decide whether to follow her familial indoctrination into violence, or stay on the moral high ground. This should have shown up about an hour earlier, and been explored in considerably greater depth, in lieu of all this banal, political garbage, of a particularly unconvincing nature. I’ve seen bad films on Tubi. I’ve seen very bad films on Tubi. But this was the first time I think I wanted a refund – and let me remind you, it’s a free service…