And each and every one of us is both,” Lou tells Lisa, in the first episode, when she confronts him about his betrayal. “This world we live in is predators and prey. The show is so unpleasant on a moment-to-moment level, it can make you forget that all the discomfort also serves some pretty repulsive ideas. Garden-variety sadists and voyeurs will likely be bored. There’s so much screen time devoted to people, usually Lisa or Lou, writhing in pain that you’d probably have to be some kind of niche fetishist to get any enjoyment out of it. The monsters-writhing spectral figures, literally faceless women-are nothing we haven’t seen before. Yet another miniseries that should’ve been a 90-minute film, it wrings way too much content out of too little material. Still, even the style-over-substance horror crowd seems bound to be disappointed by Cherry Flavor. (Unfortunately, the wonderfully funny Good Placebreakout Manny Jacinto feels wasted in a bland role as Lisa’s old friend.) A trio of strong lead performances counteracts the flatness of the characters as written Keener, in particular, uses her inherent warmth to delightfully diabolical ends. For no small number of Netflix subscribers, that will surely be enticement enough. noir and body horror in the early David Cronenberg mold. What it is, is a technically competent, thematically bankrupt, utterly gratuitous pastiche of L.A. Then-surprise, surprise-he makes a move on Lisa, she rejects him and suddenly she starts hearing about a different director attached to the project. He wants to adapt it into a feature, with Lisa as director, and cuts her a $10,000 check to option it on the spot. She has been summoned there by the abrasive, powerful but somewhat washed-up producer Lou Burke (Eric Lange, recently seen in HBO’s Perry Mason reboot), on the strength of a spooky short film she made. What little it does contribute to the post-#MeToo discourse around predatory men, vulnerable women and the price of fame falls somewhere between reactionary and obvious.īased on the 1996 novel by Todd Grimson and set in the early ‘90s, a backdrop that mostly just looks like a noirish 2021 minus the smartphones, Cherry Flavor opens with young filmmaker Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar of Alita: Battle Angel and Undone) arriving in Los Angeles. Although each gore-soaked frame radiates confidence that it’s blowing our minds, the show has nothing new to say. The latest regurgitation of this hoary premise is Brand New Cherry Flavor, a lurid eight-part horror series that comes to Netflix on Aug.
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