Look at little ol’ Redbox trying to turn one of their crappy action concepts into a franchise. Most of the films they help bankroll suck, and “Black Site” (2022) isn’t much different. It’s cliche-filled, blood-soaked, CIA-espionage boilerplate, as a rogue terrorist (or is he?) tries to kill the good guys (or are they?) at a secret base in Jordan. Michelle Monaghan is the presumed good guy and Jason Clarke is the presumed villain, so at least there’s some talent on board. And it’s actiony enough that you might actually be interested in seeing how it plays out, despite the cliches.
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The nascent Redbox production studio has helped finance some crappy movies, but they may have grabbed hold of something with “Becky” (2020). By traditional standards, it’s still bad. But bad in a low-budget, grindhousey sort of way, and fun for the whole family (provided the whole family likes gore). A teen girl, still mourning the loss of her mother, is brought to her old house for a weekend getaway. Some Nazis led by Kevin James (seriously) join the party and slasher hijinks ensue, but with a girl-power twist. Some of the violence is so over-the-top gross, it’s laughable. Or cringeable.
I once wrote a novel about a sarcastic person whom everyone took seriously. Thus, the sarcastic person ended up having to play out a lie they never meant to tell. Now, if someone told you Redbox was joining the original content game along with Netflix and Amazon Prime, you’d think that someone was sarcastic. What if that someone was Redbox and you actually believed them, so they had to hire Bob Saget to make a godawful film about an intervention where the interveners are more messed up than the intervened? It’s called “Benjamin” (2019) and it’s worse than my novel.
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