When Maeve (Charlotte MacInnes) gets suspended from school after a political demonstration backfires, her mother (Susan Prior), who also happens to be the institution’s principal, sends the Sydney teenager to live with her cousin Taylah (Natalie Abbott) in the Australian outback.

Dunburn, the fictional locale in which Rebel Wilson’s uneven directorial debut The Deb is set, is a small town recovering from a years-long drought and dereliction of duty by national ministries. The local government desperately needs money to maintain their water supply and have resorted, in one of the film’s more humorous gags, to making a viral video to bring attention to their plight. Of course, none of these issues concern Maeve, who arrives in Dunburn already plotting her escape. 

Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Deb chronicles Maeve’s fish-out-of-water adventures in Dunburn. Upon arrival, the cosmopolitan teen loudly rejects the town’s regressive traditions. In particular, Maeve bemoans the annual debutante ball, which Taylah dreams of attending. She can’t understand why her cousin would submit herself to such retrograde pomp and circumstance. Soon, of course, Maeve realizes that she can’t so easily write this small town or its people off.

The Deb is based on the well-received stage musical of the same name by Hannah Reilly (who returns to write the screenplay) and Meg Washington (who serves as an executive producer). It’s a campy movie musical whose cultural self-awareness when it comes to teenage life might draw comparisons to this year’s Mean Girls musical adaptation but whose narrative owes much to Muriel’s Wedding. Taylah, like Muriel, is a big-hearted country girl who dreams of love and social acceptance — the kind of underdog screen protagonist who has become more common since P.J. Hogan’s 1994 film premiered at TIFF. 

Whereas Muriel wanted to get married, Taylah wants to find a date to the debutante ball, a tradition that makes her feel closer to her deceased mother. Her transformation and friendship with Maeve drive most of the film’s action and offer a heartwarming, if predictable, relationship to root for. It helps that MacInnes (who played Maeve in the stage production) and Abbott fully embrace their characters and the exaggerations required of the movie musical. Their performances, as well as a handful of others including Shane Jacobson as Taylah’s father Rick and Tara Morice as a local tailor, soften the film’s more glaring contrivances. 

Outside of the acting, which leans into the ridiculous and amplifies the campy nature of the film, The Deb struggles in its translation to the screen. The music is contemporary pastiche — riffing on different genres and arranged in ways that recall the Pitch Perfect covers — and although a handful are memorable, thoughts of many fade with the credits. Wilson’s direction is similarly uneven, especially toward the middle of the film, which packs in convenient plot points to distract from narrative thinness. The result is off-kilter pacing that threatens to undo the film’s more successful parts. 

Like this year’s Mean Girls, The Deb does successfully play with the tools of the social media age, adjusting the aspect ratio to mimic iPhones and incorporating the use of platforms like TikTok or Instagram into its storytelling. The film opens with a bullish pop number (one of the movie’s strongest) introducing Maeve’s world at an elite private school in Sydney. The new teenage experience involves documenting every aspect of their lives and engaging in Plastics-like mocking and cruelty.

The catch, of course, is that all of these students are hyper-attuned to injustice so they always punch up instead of down. Maeve’s popularity — both IRL and online — stems from her outspokenness on feminist issues. But she’s also a classic bully, and after one of her political acts goes awry, her classmates are more than eager to obliterate her reputation. In the spirit of the most high-profile cancellations of the 21st century, Maeve retreats from public life to reflect. 

The country air doesn’t suit our chronically online city girl, so from the moment Maeve arrives in Dunburn, she begins plotting her departure. She plans to make her great return to Sydney with a podcast that chronicles her small-town life and begins recording all of her interactions. She ropes in Taylah, making her journey to the deb ball the main narrative, and interviews the resident mean girls, Danielle (Brianna Bishop), Chantelle (Karis Oka), Annabelle, (Stevie Jean) and Annabelle’s mother Janette (played by Wilson), a beautician who makes Regina George seem angelic. As Maeve zips around town investigating, she’s also pursued by a bad boy named Mitch (Hal Cumpston), whom we never learn all that much about. 

A significant portion of The Deb’s plot revolves around Maeve keeping the true intentions of her podcast a secret while forming a genuine friendship with Taylah, but there are other narratives stuffed into this film. One involves the fate of Dunburn, which is in desperate need of government funds, and the other concerns a will-they-or-won’t-they romance between Rick and Shell (Morice), the town’s tailor. These threads are introduced with confident set pieces and catchy tunes that accompany decent choreography, but the balance is lost once the plot lines require more involvement. Despite its 2-hour runtime, parts of The Deb can feel frustratingly shallow. 

That could be forgiven if the rest of the movie meaningfully cohered, but it doesn’t. The Deb, much like Maeve’s experience in Dunburn, is ultimately a mixed bag. 

We’ve all been around people who have made us feel uncomfortable and pushed social boundaries. And sometimes, there are people who are downright strange to the point of being sociopathic in their inappropriate behavior. This is an archetype executed to perfection by James McAvoy in Speak No Evil.

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An American remake of a 2022 Danish film (our review), Speak No Evil follows an American family, father Ben (Scoot McNairy: Monsters 2010), mother Louise (Mackenzie Davis: Terminator: Dark Fate 2019), and daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler: The King Tide 2023), as they vacation at the isolated residence of another seemingly friendly and carefree English family they had met on a previous vacation to Italy. As the week progresses, however, the host couple, Paddy (McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi: Stopmotion 2023), frequently exhibit bizarre behavior and conduct themselves inappropriately in the presence of their passive guests while their mute son, Ant (Dan Hough: Hollyoaks 2024), behaves timidly and fearfully in front of his parents.

Are the hosts innocent, untroubled country folk with unusual cultural habits? Or are they taking advantage of their guests’ pushover nature for more sinister intentions?

It is no question that McAvoy steals the show. His performance as Paddy is both charismatic and menacing, making for an uncomfortable and disturbing experience that our poor protagonists must endure under his umbrella, as they are shown to be incredibly meek and easy to prey upon. At all times McAvoy is hard to read, injecting echoes of his portrayal as the Horde from 2017’s Split. An irresistible presence shedding its skin once in the safety of its own environment like a true predator.

Such that the film does successfully capture the uncomfortable feeling of the Danish original, as the audience is kept wincing every scene as their sense of decency and manners are constantly offended, as a sort of twisted episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. For those who have never seen the Danish original, this will prove to be very effective. However, for those who have, it will be very familiar territory to the point that the first two-thirds of the film are almost beat-for-beat of the original.

It is in the third act where the film pivots extremely hard to deviate from the 2022 film, in a way that feels very Americanized. For those who have seen the Danish original, and its absolutely brutal final act, this remake falls short of that due to the changes made toward the end that had to have been implemented to play better for American audiences. In this respect, this version is definitely lesser than the original yet is still an effective end of summer chiller. And McAvoy’s performance is worth the price of admission alone.

Speak No Evil released on September 12, 2024, and is in theaters now!

Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1984 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. Imagine a world where This is Spinal Tap and Repo Man hit theaters on the same day. That is the world of 1984.

We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly three dozen.

Yes, we’re insane, but 1984 was that great of a year for film.

The articles will come out on the same day the films hit theaters in 1984 so that it is their true 40th anniversaries. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory.

This time around, it’s Sept. 14, 1984, and we’re off to see Exterminator 2, Ninja III: The Domination, and A Soldier’s Story.

Exterminator 2

When I watched Exterminator back in 1980/2020, I did not think four years later I would be reviewing a sequel.

John Eastland (Robert Ginty) has still been making his way around New York City from time to time with his flamethrower, dishing out his own form of justice. As the sequel kicks off, Eastland finds four men robbing a store and kills two of them, unaware they worked for X (Mario Van Peebles), and one of them was his brother. X vows revenge while also putting together a deal for a huge shipment of cocaine that he feels will let him take control of the city. Along the way, X kills an old friend of Eastland’s as well as his girlfriend, setting up the Exterminator to have plenty of reasons for taking down his budding criminal empire.

I was unaware they could make a worse film in the Exterminator series, but they succeeded.

There are massive leaps in logic throughout the film of people just seemingly figuring things out. But, by far, the funniest part comes when John and Caroline (Deborah Geffner) go through Central Park on a date, and stop to watch some break dancers… and continue to watch them. One has to remember this film was released by Cannon Film Distributors, which also released Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo in this year. Cannon really went all-in on break dancing in 1984.

The film isn’t entertaining in the “it’s so bad, it’s good” way. It’s just bad. The script is laughable and you spend most of the movie wondering how X thinks $500,000 worth of cocaine – which fits in just one duffle bag – is going to be enough for him to take over the city. A plan he states multiple times.

This is a definite pass.

Ninja III: The Domination

I lived in Phoenix, Arizona, from 1971 to 1978. Both my parents were raised there.

We had no idea the Valley of the Sun had many issues with ninjas.

Christie Ryder (Lucinda Diskey) is a telephone linewoman, and while working she spots a ninja dying in the desert who had just engaged in a lengthy fight on a golf course. (It actually makes sense in the film despite making no sense here) She runs over to check on him, and his spirit possesses her, making her into his vessel of vengeance against those who killed him. She ends up falling for a policeman who was involved in the death of the ninja and later has to try to fight the ninja spirit from killing him as well.

This movie tries hard to cash in on the ninja crazy of the early 1980s, but it is just so off-the-wall that it is distracting. You have the fact the ninjas are all running around Phoenix – which, even if you never lived there, it’s distracting as the desert setting makes no sense – horrible special effects, and a very odd sex scene involving V8. Yes, as in the juice. And it is more of a cringe-inducing moment than anything sexy.

Once again, this is a film from Cannon Film Distributors, and while there is no breakdancing, Diskey is the woman in both Breakin’ films. In other words, she starred in three Cannon films in one year. You have to respect her grind.

This film is, once again, bad, but it’s good for some laughs such as the incredibly bad floating sword scene. It’s worth checking out as part of several 80s trends, but don’t expect to walk away loving it.

And just think of the poor residents of Phoenix who have had to put up so many ninjas.

A Soldier’s Story

After watching two films by Cannon Film Distributors, it was nice to see something completely different.

Based on a play, CPT. Richard Davenport (Howard E. Rollins Jr.) is sent to Fort Neal in Louisiana to investigate the murder of Master Sergeant Vernon Waters (Adolph Caesar). Davenport uncovers many secrets of the segregated base operating in the Jim Crow South during the time of World War II.

The film is engaging from start to finish, although there are times when you wish for a bit less of the murder mystery and more of just the soldiers’ lives. They are fully fleshed-out characters; you want to learn more about them, but there is insufficient time.

It’s not a cheerful watch as you hear about what everyone is going through, or what the ultimate reason is for the murder, but it’s a worthwhile use of your time for some amazing perfomances.

1984 Movie Reviews will return on Sept. 19 with Amadeus!