Costa Rican Summer, 2010
Kyle (Brock Kelly) arrives in Costa Rica to visit his Aunt Carla (Susan Ward), only to learn that her resort is under threat from local surf champion Brad (David Chokachi). Kyle attempts to recruit washed up surfer Dinger (Peter Dante) to help save the resort. In the meantime, Kyle also cultivates a romance with Eva (Julianna Guill), a young woman who is vacationing at the resort.
This is a stilted, unfunny mess with just enough glimmers of potential to make you believe this could have been a decent mid-tier comedy.
As abysmal as this movie is overall, there are a few positives that make it more tolerable than expected. To start with, is it obvious that Pamela Anderson (who plays herself as a recurring fantasy that Dinger has when drunk or in withdrawal) did this movie because she could do her entire role in like an hour of filming in a studio somewhere and also there’s a monologue at the end about her being, like, both sexy and a good person? Yes. But that doesn’t change the fact that Anderson is always a fun, charismatic, sexy presence, even if her entire job in this movie is delivering lines while sitting on a chair.
I also really liked Julianna Guill as Kyle’s love interest. They do her character dirty by starting with the overused trope of a woman being mean to a guy for no reason so that later he can shame her for it and thus force her to make it up to him by being nice and spending time with him. But once the movie is past that very dumb hurdle, their subplot actually ends up being pretty nice. All of the other romantic/secs in this movie are pretty gross in one way or another---either because someone is coercive, mean spirited, or just because it doesn’t make sense. But Kyle and Eva’s relationship develops nicely, the actors have decent chemistry, and their conversations about taking risks and breaking from the expected path is an okay theme for the film. A sequence where Kyle teaches Eva to surf is probably the nicest sequence in the film.
So if this whole movie was just Kyle and Eva circling each other and learning to surf and debating going to college, we’d be on solid ground. Sadly, the Kyle-Eva subplot only makes up about 25% of the movie, and the rest of the film is pretty bleak.
There’s not much to say in addition to the completely accurate internet pile-on about Dante’s performance in the lead role. I don’t know if he was wearing bad veneers, or if it was just a choice to deliver every line with his mouth as open as possible, but it’s almost physically painful watching him deliver his dialogue. He cannot portray emotions, like even the basic ones, and his character is only seen in a positive light because he’s being contrasted with an actual sexual predator. (Though his reaction to learning that Carla is being blackmailed into sex she doesn’t want is to laugh about it and make a bunch of sex puns to a horrified Kyle, so . . . ). The fact that the script then forces Carla into falling in love with him is beyond, and by extension makes her look stupid and shallow.
The other major subplot involves Kyle’s friends, Tasty (Max Van Ville) and Doobie (Drew Roy), who have come along to get tutoring from Carla to pass a high school test. In addition to sexually harassing Carla, the young men get into a contentious flirting relationship with babes Inga (Sheila Platt) and Rikki (Dena Collar). On all levels, I found this subplot particularly bad. Ostensibly, the point of it is that the guys realize that they should better themselves. But the reality is that the women are really nasty to them---mocking their bodies and their intellects. And since the movie can’t conceive of bettering yourself without a woman as a prize, they remain the trophy that the guys chase, despite having revealed themselves to be incredibly mean-spirited. This subplot is also used to generate a lot of uninspired topless nudity from the women and the whole thing is lazy and ill-conceived.
It’s also pretty shocking to note how unattractive the film looks. There is color to be found in the costumes worn by the female characters, but other than that they manage to make the beach look muddy and uninspiring. Low budget doesn’t have to be synonymous with low effort, but in this case it really seems to be true.