There are only so many adult party games that can be made into sinister horror films. Truth or Dare has been done multiple times in a variety of ways. Mafia, aka Werewolves Within, aka Among Us, is pretty much a formula for horror whodunit at this point, being used in Bodies Bodies Bodies, Cryo, and the obvious Werewolves Within, among others. Yet, despite having some easily discernable motives you could attach to a horror story, Spin the Bottle is more of a rarity. The game hasn't had many horror adaptations outside of 2011's Spin the Bottle: The Kiss of Death. Gavin Wiesen's smooching and summoning film caught my attention this weekend, and I decided to give it a spin for myself.
Going blindly into horror films will always be my favorite way to watch. I hadn't heard anything about Spin the Bottle prior to crossing paths with it while looking through a selection of PVOD releases. What I saw was Barbarian and Tusk alum Justin Long (who co-directs a fantastic segment in V/H/S/Beyond this weekend, too), House on Haunted Hill and Final Destination's Ali Larter, Annabelle and New Life actor Tony Amendola, and the writer of the underrated Plague Town, John Cregan, were all attached. That's a lot of horror credentials for a movie that seemingly didn't want to be found.
Spin the Bottle starts auspiciously enough, with a group of teenagers in the late 70s attempting to convince morally studious Lorelai (Samantha Cormier) to let them all play the kissing game in her parents' basement. The group becomes more enamored when she tells them that her father has built a dark chapel down there. Carefree, the teens decide to play the game while seated around a pentagram and wind up summoning a demon who possesses the dark preacher's daughter, who winds up slaughtering all of the teenagers, herself, and cursing their Texas property to the point of local legend.
Fast forward to the present, the audience meets the lead protagonist, Cole (Tanner Stine), while dropping his mother (Larter) off at a mental care facility. The recent loss of Cole's father weighs heavy, forcing the two to move back to Texas to the house his mother grew up in. She warns him to stay out of the basement while he stays there on his own but mentions nothing of the place's dark history. Albeit, her desire to commit herself before moving back may be worth noting. Still, a high-school senior is going to be a high-school senior. After making frenemies on the school's football team and catching the eye of a few female admirers, the whole group decides to initiate Cole into the neighborhood with a friendly game of Spin the Bottle in his basement.
As I said in my opening, it's easy to imagine scenarios where Spin the Bottle could inspire an explosive horror premise. You have a pressure cooker of teenage hormones and emotions, lustful projections and expectations, that are ripe for pairing with envy and wrath. There's even some subtext to be played with when considering Cregan's setup of religious traditionalism and puritanical beliefs against free love and polyamorous ideas the game helps create in those minds. At that point, you may not even need a story about a demon. Probably not. But supernatural scares ensue, nonetheless.
Character introductions and the overall exposition of Spin the Bottle really harkens back to the late 90's post Scream movies, giving the feel of the onslaught of films at the turn of the century that featured a beautiful, hip, young cast and fettered in icons into the supporting roles. Funny enough, Long and Larter are certainly a part of that legacy, now playing the more ancillary roles for a new batch of up-and-comers. But while the cast is pretty solid, including a wonderful performance by Kaylee Kaneshiro as Kasey, the movie itself is as messy as it gets, including many loose ends and even more exposition-driven inferences that never really get explored.
Many aspects of the movie preach love in autonomy over a relationship collective, an interesting commentary on religion and youthful desire, and even some notes of two football players possibly feeling something for one another. Yet the movie never smooths any of these allusions and even adds head-scratching confusion by the end by ultimately not saying anything at all. Add in that the film's effects budget could have probably used a shot in the arm as well, with many CGI moments just not hitting the mark. They're not always noticeable, but they manage to affect the film when they are.
Yet, I think the entirety of Spin the Bottle can be summed up in one scene. In the middle of the film, a funeral for a Spin the Bottle victim causes the whole group to want to play the game again, insisting their lost friend would have wanted them to. The scene is played deadpan and marks the most unintentionally funny moment I've seen in horror this year. While some horror fans are going to read that and decide not to waste their time, others will read that and think, "I have to see what he's talking about." Beyond that, the film is just kind of lackluster. Long and Larter are great, but their roles are limited. And the film, at an unnecessary two hours and five minutes, sits in a strange place where it either has a lot of fat to cut or a lot of meat to add back in.
Distributed by Paramount, the film follows the old-school playbook made famous by Miramax, who bought up indie properties and released them under their banner. The lower the purchasing cost, the higher the profit payoff. This playbook will likely head back to the theater model when movie studios get their heads on straight and begin to realize the sequel, reboot, and requel model of established properties is growing more and more played out, even leading Marvel to readdress its strategy after a shaky 2023. With the streaming wars growing more stagnant and Paramount attempting to keep itself from shuttering, a title like Spin the Bottle would have been a silly-fun-romp for anyone with a Paramount+ subscription to discover, especially as the service hasn't offered many premiere options for horror fans this October compared to others.
Regardless, after resorting to the fifteen-dollar purchase, this will likely be the ultimate factor in whether or not I thought the movie was worth it. While it was an entertaining bit of procrastination on my Saturday afternoon, if it had been included in the twelve-dollar monthly subscription cost bundled with other content, I could have shrugged it off and thought nothing of it. Still, while I don't think it's worth your hard-earned fifteen dollars, there's something about taking a chance on an original film I don't regret. Spin the Bottle is now available on PVOD, but this might be one you'll want to wait to see streaming.
Spin The Bottle | Official Trailer | Paramount Movies
When a group of friends play spin the bottle in a house marked by a brutal massacre, they unknowingly unleash an evil spirit and start dying in terrifying ways. Now, the survivors must stick together to uncover the house's dark secrets and end the bloodshed. Starring Ali Larter and Justin Long.