"BATSH*T BRIDE" (2020)

BATSH*T BRIDE

Written & directed by Jonathan Smith
Starring Meghan Falcone, Josh Covitt & Jonny Svarzbein
Running time: 1 hour, 21 minutes
Unrated

Heather (Meghan Falcone) is an event planner going full "Bridezilla". In the days leading up to her own wedding she's cracking the whip on her family, her fiance and the group of friends she's enlisted to help her pull the big day off. What's worse, she's outbidding another young woman for elements from her wedding like the dress and the flowers! Truly cutthroat. Heather is a character you don't like, right from the jump but that's about all that sets Batsh*t Bride apart from any number of bland comedies released in a given year.




With a title like Batsh*t Bride, and after seeing how miserable a person our main character was, I was expecting something with some teeth, some edge, some kind of vicious streak to set it apart. To be fair, I think it tries but those attempts feel as out of character as Heather's decision to participate in April Fools' Day, which sets her on a vague path to learning ...something.

Heather's prank is to tell her fiancé Bryce (Josh Covitt) that she has cold feet about their impending nuptials, which backfires when Bryce admits he's been feeling the same way. This scene should be something: funny, shocking, upsetting, but instead it just rolls across very flatly. The only laugh it got out of me was when Bryce calls his parents while leaving the table. Covett's delivery of the line "Mom. Dad. The wedding's off." is great.

Honestly, a lot what I enjoyed and what stuck with me in the days after watching Batsh*t Bride was the line deliveries. The cast is doing their best with a script that, though I'm sure it wasn't, feels like a first draft. Case in point: Heather's bridesmaids. There are 3 of them, but two are so bland that I can't remember anything about their characters. The 3rd swings it so far in the other direction that it only calls the blandness of the other 2 into greater contrast: she's some kind of con artist always just a few steps ahead of the authorities on her tail. Does this serve any purpose to the story? Nope. So "nope" in fact that I'd believe the actress herself (Kayla Conroy I believe) invented that backstory on set.

This uneven tone and general blandness is a shame because there is the seed of a good movie here. After her wedding falls apart, Heather decides to lighten up a little and also to use her event planner powers to upgrade Maria's (Allison Lopez's) wedding - the young woman she'd been outbidding - and it's during this overnight wedding upgrade (which sounds like the title of an HGTV show) that we finally see more dimension in Heather and her relationship with Bryce. Falcone and Covitt have good onscreen chemistry, but these small scenes and interactions basically happen amid what amounts to an extended wedding makeover montage so they don't really land.

Batsh*t Bride suffers slightly from a low budget and lowered production values, but all that would be forgivable or even charming if the writing were really polished or especially daring or unique. Hell, I'd settle for memorable, but it just isn't. There's no unifying feeling to the humor, almost as if different scenes were written by different people: there are bizarre sight gags (Heather travelling to the middle of a lake in the blink of an eye to talk to a friend in a canoe), on-the-nose dialogue for comedic effect (Heather's great-grandma Adonia (Donna Swensen) asking her "Where's that handsome groom I've been staying alive to meet?") and at one point it just becomes Liar Liar when Heather apparently misunderstands the mechanics of April Fools' Day and just tells everyone what she secretly thinks of them! Like, how is that a prank? Is she from another planet?

I hate to rain on a filmmaker's parade, I really do, but this just missed on almost every front for me. But if you'd like to see some actors making the best of a half-baked script and actually wringing a few decent laughs out of it, seek this out when it drops in early April.




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