‘Spin the Bottle’ VOD Review
Stars: Tanner Stine, Ali Larter, Ryan Whitney, Angela Halili, Justin Long, Kaylee Kaneshiro, Tony Amendola | Written by John Cregan | Directed by Gavin Wiesen
It’s 1978 in Jenkins, Texas, and, with their parents away, a group of teens decides to play spin the bottle in the basement of one of the group’s houses. The fact she does her best to get them to play elsewhere just makes them more determined to convince her. Once we see the basement, it’s obvious why she didn’t want them down there, it’s full of snakes, pentagrams and other spooky stuff. Needless to say, this does not end well.
In the present day, Cole (Tanner Stine; The Nine-Ball Corridor, Days of Our Lives) and his mother Maura (Ali Larter; The Last Victim, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter) have run into rough times since the death of his father. She’s checking herself into a facility to get herself back together, he’s going to make the old family home liveable. But before he does, she warns him not to go into the basement until she’s there. And to deny that he’s related to the Randells, the family that used to live there.
Director Gavin Wiesen (The Art of Getting By, All Nighter) and writer John Cregan (Plague Town, Devolved) give Spin the Bottle a clichéd but serviceable start. Unfortunately, it only gets more clichéd as Cole makes the football team, impressing Milla (Ryan Whitney; The Thinning, The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time) and Sophie (Angela Halili; The Wrong Cheerleader, Random Tropical Paradise) and making some enemies in the process.
If you guess they’re soon celebrating Cole’s addition to the team in the basement, spinning a familiar-looking bottle, congratulations, you know your clichés. Give yourself another pat on the back if you guessed weird shit starts happening and someone ends up dead before dawn. And then prepare yourself, because Spin the Bottle is two hours and five minutes stuffed full of every teenagers vs evil spirits cliché the filmmakers could think of, and that’s a lot of clichés.
Apart from being overlong and overly familiar, Spin the Bottle also features some of the dumbest characters I’ve seen in a while. After playing the title game, pissing off some spirits and having a friend meet a mysterious death, what do they do at her wake? Yep, they play spin the bottle with the same damn bottle and the same results. It’s like they have a death wish.
Spin the Bottle does benefit from appearances, however brief, not just from Ali Larter but Justin Long (Tusk, Barbarian) as Sheriff Stanton, the local cop whose daughter Kasey (Kaylee Kaneshiro; Legacies, The Locksmith) Cole gets involved with, and Tony Amendola (The Borrower, New Life) as Father Harris a priest with ties to the original killings. Unfortunately, there’s only so much even seasoned performers like them can do with this material.
Effects are next to nonexistent. Spin the Bottle is very much a PG-13 film, and there’s only one even mildly gory scene. Apart from that, the kills are bloodless or off-screen. Granted, effects alone couldn’t have saved this mess, but they might have at least helped break up its many long dull stretches and reams of expository dialogue.
But what the film really needed was a script that had much of that information shown rather than talked about, its overall length trimmed and a couple of original ideas added in. In other words, a complete rewrite. The basic idea was workable, but the finished product is a mess that makes Tarot or even 7 Deadly Sins look like minor masterpieces.
* 1/5
Paramount currently has Spin the Bottle available for purchase as a digital download.
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