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| "Sounds gross. I'm totally in." |
"True Love Conquers All". This is one of the most basic tenets in
storytelling. A love that can survive
even death has been romanticized as long as there has been media to tell
stories. After all, who among us is
immune to a great tragic love story?
Unfortunately, Slamdance festival selection Clinger is not a
great tragic love story. In fact, it's
not even a good one.
Driven high school student Fern falls for cute but clingy
Robert, who dies while professing his love.
Robert isn't about to let something like death keep him from the woman
he loves, and he'll go to occasionally bizarre and terrifying lengths to spend
forever with her. Clinger is a
horror comedy that can never quite decide if it wants to be horror or
comedy. What it is instead is an awkward
mess that's embarrassingly weird rather than scary or funny. It is the unholy hybrid of It Follows,
Ghostbusters, Twilight and My Boyfriend's Back that you never
thought you'd see simply because it has no reason to exist.
The two leads, newcomer Jennifer Laporte as Fern and Vincent
Martella as Robert, are easily the best part of Clinger. They seem to be having fun with the
ridiculousness of the material, keeping it grounded while everything else falls
apart around them. And fall apart it
does. What starts out as an interesting
and fun concept quickly devolves into bizarre nonsense, punctuated by laughably
amateurish digital effects and production values to rival a late night Cinemax film. There is occasionally an honest chuckle or
two, but the unintentional chuckles are much louder and more frequent.
Clinger hits VOD and limited run theaters on October 23rd.
Score
-Mike Stec
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