Lenore Zion & Nick Antosca’s "BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR"
Review by Dennis D. McDonald
“Watch out for the girl with the eye patch.”
The eight episode series BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR is a reminder of what can be accomplished when a talented team is free to push the artistic envelope.
Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar) comes to Hollywood dreaming of hitting it big. A big time producer sees Lisa’s short horror film, is impressed, then proceeds to steal the production rights.
Lisa is not pleased. She seeks the services of a modern day witch to make the producer suffer. The tangled story then plays out with lots of blood, zombies, body horror, very tightly scripted dialog (often funny), weird apparitions, and glimpses of the cutthroat nature of early 90’s Hollywood.
What holds this all together is an amazing performance by Rosa Salazar (Alita Battle Angel, Undone) as the driven director who wants to get her movie made her way despite the evil that must be experienced along the way.
Why the title? Who knows. What I know is that a few times I had to stop watching, not because of the copious amounts of blood being spilled or the ratcheting up of tension, but because I wanted to be sparing in partaking of the constant barrage of total weirdness interspersed with frequent laugh out loud dark humor. (I told Number One Son that one way of describing the series is “Cronenberg Meets Lynch but with occasional humor.”)
The series really starts firing on all cylinders three or four episodes in. One could be forgiven for at first thinking that there’s no way for all these threads to be pulled together. One’s patience will be rewarded even if some of what is put on screen makes one squirm. If you like “weird” this one’s for you. You’ve been warned!
Review copyright 2022 by Dennis D McDonald