Plot
A contractor and his wife move to Malibu to flip his mother's beach house and are terrorized by the deranged homeless lady living under the house.
Cast
The consistently weak Mena Suvari stars alongside Kristin "True Blood" Bauer who deserves better than this.
Verdict
This was a film I was entirely unaware of until it popped up on the entertainment list on a flight I was in. Seeing Bauer and being more than slightly tired I decided to give it a try and saying I was underwhelmed is an understatement.
Let me be clear, Paradise Cove isn't a bad movie it's just more like a Lifetime Original movie than a horror film. In fact the more I think about that the more accurate the statement becomes.
Couple are tormented by this crazy mind game playing lady and it never really feels like it's going anywhere and that's probably because it doesn't at all. It plods along, characters behave in rather unbelievable ways, Bauer outshines everyone, Suvari is just dreadful and it builds to a predictable finale that quite frankly makes me wonder if the whole thing was AI made because if an AI wrote a movie it would look something like this. What I mean by that is it's ripped from other movies and is absolutely soullless.
Paradise Cove is a mediocre throw away and forget about movie, nothing more.
Rants
This is one of those realistic horrors but in trying to be it ironically becomes unrealistic because of how characters behave in the movie and they have to in order for the movie to keep going. Characters behave bafflingly, characters allow things to them and then just get on with it in unbelievable fashions which just makes our "Heroes" look week. If people behaved rationally these movies wouldn't be able to exist, that's perhaps something the industry should try to counter.
The Good
Kristin Bauer
Not the worst premise
The Bad
Weak leads
Entirely predictable
That one senseless death trope that I'm absolutely SICK of.
