Paradise Cove: Cauchemar à Malibu

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.

Bad acting, bad script, bad storyline. Everything that happens is just so unbelievable. The story, their actions, just everything. Give it a miss

It's hard to feel invested in a movie where the characters behave in ways that logical humans would not. The husband constantly downplays the wife's concerns, when if anything, they should both be MORE concerned. An unstable woman is squatting below their house and that woman is breaking and entering and claiming the house is hers. That's not a nuisance. That's a BIG PROBLEM and to treat it otherwise is just unrealistic. It's always better in storytelling when the characters do everything a logical person would do and yet STILL find themselves in trouble.

Also, how long has this woman been homeless? There's a point where a person's Botox and face and lip fillers would have worn off. Or am I supposed to believe a homeless woman is buying plastic surgery and aesthetic procedures?

On a positive, it's kind of a throwback to domestic thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or Pacific Heights. That far-fetched weirdly uncomfortable scenario.

Silly plot, silly storyline, silly characters, silly dialogue, silly CGI...just downright silly!

Movie highlight: A government employee saying 'peace out' to a client, instead of 'goodbye', like a normal human being in that role would.

Would not recommend.

I probably should of watched the trailer before I put this on. I liked the concept but this movie sucked. Some of the acting and cinematography were terrible. I wouldn't recommend watching this film. 4 stars.