Netflix And Chill: The Wrong Paris (2025)

Once I'd finished watching The Wrong Paris, I checked out a few of the credits. I was unsurprised to see that director Janeen Damian has a filmography that lists a lot of producing credits on Christmas TV movies, and her previous two features were two of the Lindsay Lohan movies made as part of her Netflix deal. The Wrong Paris is a film that should have been given the Christmas wrapping. It's absolutely on par with many other films in that vein, albeit with a few compromises made to some more modern sensibilities, and it's another Netflix film that feels like what it is, content.

Miranda Cosgrove plays Dawn, a young Texan woman who hopes to travel to Paris and study at an art school there. She has been saving up for that dream for years, but recently had to spend the majority of her money on some medical expenses incurred by ger grandmother, Birdie (Frances Fisher). Her sister, Emily (Emilija Baranac), convinces her that she should audition for a TV show called "The Honeypot" (think of The Bachelor and you're close enough). It's even going to be set in Paris . . . Texas. After the disappointment of realising that she's still a long way from France, Dawn figures that passing a couple of the main challenges could get her enough money to help boost her savings. So Dawn joins the show and starts to act as if she really doesn't want to be there, as per her aim. But things change when she starts to have very obvious chemistry with the handsome "prize" of the show, Trey McAllen (Pierson Fodé).

Cosgrove is a decent lead, although she's served better by the comedy moments when her character isn't interested in being in the show than when she has to resort to the typical loved-up act. Fodé has clearly based his character entirely around his abs, and he supports those abs with enough charm and warmth to make himself seem worthy of being a TV show prize. Yvonne Orji does well as Rachel, a producer on the show who is often the only one aware of the reason for Dawn's behaviour, and Madison Pettis convinces as the main competitor, Lexi, an online influencer who knows the best way to play to the cameras and potentially win the show. Elsewhere, Christin Park, Madeleine Arthur, and Veronica Long are fun contestants, and both Fisher and Baranac are perfectly fine in their few main scenes.

Damian directs with a degree of competence, but no desire to lift the film above anything other than a mild distraction. Nothing feels believable once we get to the show being produced, and there are too few moments making use of the language of "reality TV". It's all just about pairing up the leads, keeping them together for a while, presenting a seemingly-insurmountable obstacle, and then having things ready for a finale that will satisfy those who picked this to revel in the cheesiness and romance. 

Writer Nicole Henrich has one other writing credit before this (something tagged as both comedy and documentary online, and I cannot find out anything else about it), but this is their first solo effort. They have an idea of the template, as we all do, but they don't have any idea about how to really season their everyday recipe.

I won't hate on this, despite not really enjoying it. Cosgrove and Fodé feel like a decent match, and that helps a lot. It's not good though, unless you're just after something to play in the background as you switch your brain off and relax. Hey, maybe that is the point. In fact, we KNOW that is how some of these Netflix features are planned. It's just not always so painfully obvious and tiresome. 

3/10

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The Blackening (2023)

Expanding a skit by comedy group 3Peat, and riffing on the well-known horror trope of the black character most often being the first to die, The Blackening is a slasher comedy that I was looking forward to for some time. The marketing was pretty good, and the tagline - "we can't all die first" - was brilliantly on point. 

There's a small prologue showing a couple of people in danger, but then it's business as usual. A group of people meet up at a cabin in the woods, all there for an overdue bit of quality time with their friends during the Juneteenth holiday (a date that celebrates the end of slavery in the USA). Unfortunately, someone has set up a deadly game for them to participate in. That game involves answering various questions revolving around black culture, with a wrong answer due to result in great pain, and even death. It might be time, this time around,  for the "least black" main characters to be endangered ahead of the others. But that pits our characters against one another, as they start to prove their race credentials to one another, playing on stereotypes and clichés that are also subverted as things start to twist and turn on the way to a final act revealing the killer and motivation.

Written by Tracy Oliver (who has delivered a number of fun scripts in the past 6-7 years) and Dewayne Perkins (a member of 3Peat, and someone with a decent selection of TV credits to his name already), The Blackening is a film full of potential, and the first half hits pretty much every target. Director Tim Story has been in the game long enough to handle the material with a steady guiding hand, and the simplicity of the setting keeps the focus on the various friendships and rivalries within the main group of characters.

The cast all have fun in their roles, whether they're playing things broadly or allowed to be more low-key, and I think everyone did their best to ensure that the script was delivered as well as could be. Grace Byers, Melvin Gregg, X Mayo, Antoinette Robertson, Perkins (hey, if you co-write a screenplay then you may as well give yourself a part), Jermaine Fowler, Sinqua Walls, Jay Pharoah, and Yvonne Orji interact well with one another, and convince when faced with a masked killer, and Diedrich Bader is good fun as the aptly-named Ranger White, a character who spends a lot of time ensuring that his words aren't misconstrued when his priority should be stopping a killing spree.

Sadly, as is often the case with many horror comedies, the biggest problem here is the balance of the genre elements. There are some great laughs here, with the script often never too far away from a smart and witty observation, but there aren't any real scares or tension (decent opening sequence aside). Which means that the third act, where laughs are a bit less frequent, stumbles along to resolve everything with an underwhelming sigh. It's so disappointing that it drags down the entire movie, but there's still just enough here to make it worth a watch. And you have to bear in mind that I am saying this as a plain white Brit, so I am sure there are many African American people who will get even more out of it than I did.

A great concept, well-realised during a number of scenes, but it's a shame that there couldn't have been a better handling of the horror elements alongside the comedy. Maybe they'll do better with that if there's a sequel.

6/10

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Spontaneous (2020)

Written and directed by Brian Duffield, adapting a novel by Aaron Starmer, Spontaneous is the kind of good-natured film that should immediately make you a fan of those involved, both behind and in front of the camera. It's a great teen movie, easily sitting alongside the best of that sub-genre, and it just happens to involve a lot of spontaneous combustion.

Katherine Langford plays Mara, a cool schoolgirl who manages to stand out from the crowd without going into full quirky mode. She's good friends with Tess (Hayley Law), and the two of them seem to be happy wandering through their teen years. And then their classmates and peers start to explode. There doesn't seem to be any detectable cause, and no rhyme or reason to it. With the possibility of an early death now looking likely, Dylan (Charlie Plummer) decides to tell Mara that he has a crush on her, and has done for a while. They don't know how much time they have so they may as well enjoy some of it together.

Although he's been writing movies for almost a decade now, this is the directorial debut from Duffield, and it's a very confident one. He's helped himself immensely by casting it so well, but there's also a great balance throughout the script, blending the absurd humour of the situation with the deeper thoughts it prompts in the minds of the lead characters. It also includes some enjoyable movie references without resorting to having certain characters define themselves by dropping famous quotes in every other sentence (an error that so many other movies make when the writer wants to show how cine-literate they are).

Langford and Plummer pair up well, but it's Langford who carries more of the movie on her shoulders, being the individual in more scenes and discussing more of the unfolding situation with the voiceover provided to viewers. It's a star turn, and Langford is surely destined for even more great things in her future career path (if there's any justice). Law does well in her role, although she doesn't get to have as much fun as either Piper Perabo and Rob Huebel (playing Mara's parents). She also doesn't even get to have as much fun as Yvonne Orji, playing Agent Rosetti. I don't mean that Perabo, Huebel, and Orji are adding lots of laughs with their moments, but the way in which their characters are connected to Mara allows them to be involved in some interesting, sometimes supportive and sometimes confrontational, conversations.

Not a gore-filled splatter flick, the spontaneous combustions themselves are often allowed to happen just off-camera, with lots of blood then thrown all over people in close vicinity. Don't seek this out if you're after a horror comedy, but also don't seek it out if you prefer your films to be cosy and bloodless. It does what it needs to do in order to show how shocking the deaths are.

The more I think about Spontaneous, the more I like it. And the title is given a lot of poignancy once the first few scenes properly set out the premise. Next time you're wanting to make a spontaneous viewing choice you could do a LOT worse that this.

8/10

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