20 movies for $5; what could possibly go wrong?  Part IX.

Called Shaded Places in this collection.  A search on IMDb turned up The Giving Tree.  The cover on IMDb has the title The Brutal Truth.  Not a good sign when your movie has more names than Frank Abagnale.

This was actually the first film in the big box o’ fun.  I skipped it (and film #2) due to universally dismal reviews and comments.  In the interest of completeness, I felt compelled to watch both before playing the back ten.

This one was bad.  The worst in the collection so far.  Dreadful acting, forced awkward attempts at humor, stunningly awful ballads used as a score, leaden pace, barely detectable story, terrible possibly improvised, dialog.  The vets like Molly Ringwald and Christina Applegate are mostly bearable as they know how to calibrate their performances to this piece of crap.  Their screen time is limited, though.

Of the others, only the blonde bimbo pulls off anything resembling a character. Unfortunately, the script is so terrible I can’t even identify her character by looking at IMDb.  Is she Vanilla?  Is she Paula?  Is she Paulo?  None listed in IMDb.

I guess they were going for a Big Chill type of joint here, but failed miserably.  A group of friends gather at a place where a friend has just died.  Scenes are frequently backed with or intercut with singing.  There is even the sexy outsider — Meg Tilly in The Big Chill vs the unknown blonde here.  The Motown tunes are replaced by generic crap, real actors replaced by hacks.  An insemination is replaced by an actual birth.  I suspect the dialog includes a lot of improv, and this group just was not up to the task.

Post-Post:

• Try to remember the better times with Christina Applegate.
• Finally figured out the blonde is “Zoey”.  She actually does provide a couple of laughs.  If that is her, she is named Tiffany Salerno, and actually got story and producer credits on this joint.  Sadly she has not one subsequent credit.  Not one.  If I magnanimously gave this movie 1 star, it would be for her (for onscreen, not production skillz).
• So awful was this movie, that I actually laughed out loud at this shot.  There was about 5 genuinely funny seconds of reaction, then the script / improv quickly ruined this one oasis of quality.