‘Spin the Bottle’ Review: Even Justin Long Can’t Save It
The premise for the Paramount horror picture Spin the Bottle caught my attention immediately. Stupid teenagers play a parlor game and unleash satanic panic. Sold. Where do I sign up? If only the material had been executed more thoughtfully, this film could have been an effective distraction. Hell, it might have even been really good. Sadly, the picture’s potential is squandered. A meandering screenplay, the absence of logic, and an obscenely long runtime keep Spin the Bottle from sticking the landing.
The setup for Spin the Bottle goes like this:
This tale of supernatural pandemonium sees Cole (Tanner Stine) relocating to his mother’s (Ali Larter) small Texas hometown after his father’s suicide. Cole’s mother has checked herself into a mental health facility to recuperate from her husband’s untimely death. This leaves a heavy burden on young Cole. Cole has designs on fixing up his mother’s childhood home so the two of them can sell the house and start over. Of course, some really sinister s—t happened there. The DIY rehab will be the least of Cole’s concerns once he and his friends unwittingly unleash a dormant evil from the basement during a seemingly harmless game of Spin the Bottle.
Spin the Bottle absolutely has the bones of a watchable direct-to-streaming horror film. But the picture meanders so badly that I lost all interest long before the end credits began scrolling. The film clocks in at over 2 hours. If this were an ‘elevated’ meditation on the horrors of religious fanaticism and child abuse, I could see a justification for the extra-long runtime. But it most certainly isn’t. This a by-the-book tale of demonic mayhem that gets caught up in its own melodrama, causing the proceedings to grind to a screeching halt around the onset of the second act.
The pacing is this picture’s undoing.
Director Gavin Wiesen spends so much time focusing on the aftermath of the first death within the core friend group that all the momentum built up to that point effectively evaporates. The core cast all deliver semi-serviceable performances for this type of film. However, said performances aren’t entirely immersive. So, we’re left to pick apart the lack of nuance within the sometimes stiff showings while we wait around for something interesting to happen. That’s never a good thing. If your cast is green, it’s best to keep things moving at a breakneck pace so the viewer doesn’t have too much time to dwell on your film’s flaws.
The pacing and performances aren’t the picture’s only shortcomings, however. Some of the mythology seems like it was very much invented on the fly. At one point, a priest character enters the narrative solely for the sake of dumping exposition proclaims that only a Randell (Cole’s maternal family line) can trap or defeat the demon at the core of the narrative. That begs a series of questions, like why or how does the priest even know that? What he says proves to be true solely because screenwriter John Cregan says it is.
Cregan isn’t a bad writer, mind you. But it feels like Paramount went with a rough draft screenplay and didn’t give the scribe the time to flesh out the finer details before rushing into production. There are a lot of other aspects that feel rushed, too. I wish the script had been trimmed down and given another pass to tighten up some of the weak points.
Spin the Bottle needs more Justin Long, damn it.
Another weak point is the lack of Justin Long and Ali Larter. Both feature but are relegated to tertiary roles, and neither is given anything of significance to do. Both are horror royalty, yet each plays a character that could have just as easily been played by almost anyone.
The final blow is the shoddy CGI. The demon-monster-ghost-thing takes a smoke-like form that’s so distractingly unnatural that it takes away from the few moments of real terror. The fire effects are just as crudely rendered. Using actual smoke might have been an easy way to get around that. Just saying.
All things considered, I saw potential in Spin the Bottle. This is not a matter of inept filmmaking, more so than a rush job that didn’t allow enough time for the creatives to deliver their best work. If you are curious to see where the picture goes wrong, you can find Spin the Bottle on Digital now.
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‘Spin the Bottle'
Summary
‘Spin the Bottle’ never lives up to the potential of its premise.
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