Main cast: Suki Waterhouse (Alexis), Carly Chaikin (Danielle Williams), Kirby Howell-Baptiste (Kaela), Melissa Bergland (Chloe), Michelle Haro (Frankie), Bianca Lopez (Jesse Hall), Mia Clyburn (Carly), and Isabella Acres (Kelsey)
Director: Sophia Takal
Is New Year, New You made from one of the rejected teen slasher flick scripts languishing in the reject bin of Blumhouse Productions? Oh wait, Sophia Takal co-wrote the thing, so she can’t use that excuse to hide her shame.
I get it, perhaps this show is trying to satirize social media influencers, but is it really a satire when nearly all of the influencers on social media are vapid, hypocritical, insincere, entitled choosy beggars that will pimp out their own family members for another fifteen minutes of fame?
So, we have an influencer, Danielle Williams, who is soon getting her own TV show as well. This self-care and wellness proponent, who is also an advocate for manifestation and what not, has lowered herself to meeting some friends from high school for a New Year’s Eve party. Alexis, the host, is a failed actress turned babysitter that is jealous of Danielle making a difference in other people’s lives (oh stop laughing, not everyone is blessed with brains so let’s try to be kind) and is also resentful of the fact that Danielle now acts like a goody-goody sage person when she tormented them all in high school and even drove another girl to suicide.
It turns out that she and another two young ladies have planned to tie Danielle up and get her to confess her mean girl ways on a phone in order to ruin her image. Unfortunately for Alexis, Danielle easily uses her fame to divide the remaining girls into #TeamDanielle and #DamnDanielle, and the Alexis’s house soon turns into a battleground for deranged, vapid bimbos from hell. I wish I can say that I am joking about that last part, or that the show is playing up that particular premise for laughs, but unfortunately, it is dead serious about telling me something that I already know—influencers are the pox of the Internet—in the most misguidedly serious manner possible.
Hence, the first half of this tedious, overlong episode is about unlikable characters pretending to be nice at one another before degenerating into screaming messes of crazy hot air, while the second half is an equally tedious slasher showcase of four dumb creatures trying to kill one another. If this episode had ended ten minutes in with the whole house exploding and taking out all the wastes of flesh inside, this episode would have been a splendid one indeed.
No, instead it chooses to be a tedious, unaware, clichéd example of one of the many generic, formulaic, teens-gone-dead stuff that Blumhouse Productions puts out regularly. Hmm, is this a subliminal advertisement for the best Blumhouse Productions can be, snort? If only I had the optimism to believe that the folks behind this turd are smart enough to pull off such a thing.
