Tag: Bianca A. Santos

Whenever I read the title of this movie, I imagine the adds for The Dump furniture store. And I put it in the voice of Duffman from the Simpsons.

Hopefully you just did that too.

The DUFF might be the final January movie of the year for me to watch. Sure it came out end of February, but you can tell by looking at the poster that it wanted to come out in January, but too much suck existed in that month so it got pushed back.

Who would delay us from watching this cheaply made porno movie for so long?

Bianca Piper (Mae Whitman) is a DUFF, but she doesn’t know that and doesn’t even know the acronym. It stands for Designated Ugly Fat Friend, which every group of girls and guys has. You don’t have to be literally fat or super ugly, you just have to be less than all the other friends. This way your group of hotter thinner friends have a sort of gateway to them. If you are DUFF, you are easy to talk to and can give information about your better friends, for hook up purposes or whatever. Steven Lynch sang a song about them before they had a fun acronym.

Either way, Bianca has Casey (Bianca A. Santos) who is good at computers, hot, and good at sports and Jess (Skyler Samuels) who is into yoga, smart, and journalism. Well, they are all into journalism. Although they are totally real friends, they are also so totally DUFFing her.

She learns about the term from her next door neighbor, Wes (Robbie Amell), who is now totes max hunk but still talks together since they have been friends for so long. So once she finds out, she bails on her friends and decides to change things. She is going to be awesome on her own. She is going to unDUFF herself. But she doesn’t know how. So she works with Wes. He will help her get better and be able to talk to Toby (Nick Eversman), and she will help him pass Chemistry (so he can get scholarships, go to college, shit like that).

But wait! There is also Queen Bitch, Madison Morgan (Bella Thorne), who wants to be a future reality star and is working on being a youtube star first. She wants to ruin things and muck things up. That seems like an important plot point.

What is not important are the parents and teachers. Allison Janney is Bianca’s single mom, who is now a self help guru about getting over divorce! Chris Wylde and Ken Jeong play teachers and Romany Malco the principal.

The DUFF, in all reality, is a made for TV movie that for some reason someone put in theaters. There is nothing exceptional about it in any way. It is a comedy, but it doesn’t make you laugh. It is a high school movie, but it doesn’t offer anything new. Here is the IMDB description:

A high school senior instigates a social pecking order revolution after finding out that she has been labeled the DUFF

Social pecking order revolution? That means she is going to turn the school on its heels, probably with her sweet journalism skills, to make the DUFFs the cool kids? What? No where close? It is literally her just trying to make herself seem cooler to talk to a boy? Oh. Okay. Well that is kind of…two thirds of every high school story. Fuck.

I mean, the social pecking order revolution story line would have been just some angry kids wish fulfillment fantasy in real life, but at least it would have attempted to do something not normally done outside of Revenge of the Nerds. Instead this was just…boring if I had to say anything. And it had a couple of people involved I actually know of. I liked Mae in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Parenthood. She just doesn’t do much of anything in this movie.

Since the Transformers franchise, Hasbro has realized it can print money by having their product turned into loud explosive military forces commercials. So they started to branch out. G.I. Joe movies happened and people were either disappointed or okay with them. Okay. Sure.

Then they said, screw it, let’s turn board games into movies, not just toys. And that is why we have the atrocity that is Battleship.

And maybe after all their action films, they realized that action doesn’t have to be their only go to genre. Why not horror? That is what the kids love these days. Maybe a nice soft PG-13 horror, to get more money and revitalize one of their games. So we all hope that means they are making a new Clue Movie (that could never be as good as the original)? Nope. We are getting fucking Ouija.

This just makes me not want to floss. Are you out to ruin our teeth too, Hasbro?!

Everyone knows for Ouija (/spirit) boards, they only work if someone knows they don’t work and they make their hand move the piece around. You can trick your little bitch friends and get a laugh out of it. Haha, big joke. Well, Debbie Galardi (Shelley Hennig) never really got over it when she played as a kid. She has always felt haunted by it. And now she is in a house alone, found the board in the attic and played by herself, which is a big no no. Next thing you know, boom, she hanged herself. Hey now, it’s just a shitty game.

Needless to say, people find this news troubling. Especially Laine Morris (Olivia Cooke), Debbie’s best friend who also introduced her to the game a long time ago. Eeek. Oh, and I guess Debbie’s old boyfriend, Pete (Douglas Smith), who was in a sexual relationship with her. He is beating himself off up over this for not seeing the signs.

Well, Laine wants to just try one thing before she is willing to let her friend go. And we know what she wants to do. She wants to Ouija board it up to see if they can speak to her, because she thinks something is up.

So she gathers her boyfriend (Daren Kagasoff), her sister (Ana Coto), their friend (Bianca A. Santos), and Pete and they Ouija it up. And hey, someone answered.

But is it Debbie or someone that contacted Debbie?

Come on, you know it’s the latter. Let’s not forget Lin Shaye, she is in this movie like a lot of recent horrors. But we can forget Sierra Heuermann, because I don’t like typing out her last name and want to not do it anymore.

This is the worst depiction of a Lens Of Truth that I have ever seen.

PG-13 (or lower, if they exist?) horror movies are a bane to the genre. We aren’t say that you need swearing, tits, or gore to be scary, but disturbing violence and terror is something they have given to make a movie R before, and I have to assume PG-13 would just be slight or mild terror.

If I had to describe the terror in this movie, I would call it extra mild. Like, no one should find any part of this movie at all scary. Nothing about the board itself is scary (It moves!? It moves with no fingers?! Ahhh!). The entire thing relies on some jump scares between some ghosts that haunt the house and the kids who love to die. The deaths themselves are not creative and don’t come to anyone as a surprise.

But worse than all of that is how incredible boring the movie is. It takes awhile for them to even get their Ouija on to contact the dead friend. It felt like a third of the movie had already passed. Then a longer time before anyone even starts dying. Everyone knows you need deaths throughout a film to keep up the fear. All at the end is pointless.

Once it was over, I was glad. But then I realized how much money this movie made despite its low budget. We are going to eventually get a Ouija 2, and it will suck. Hasbro is going to make movies about Candy Land, Monopoly, and Hungry Hungry Hippos, and they too will suck (not a joke). The only one that could be good is Hungry Hungry Hippos, but only if it is a serious African drama about a herd of scary ass Hippos eating all the things.

Olivia Cooke is being typecasted into these shitty horror movies. The Quiet Ones and The Signal were bad. Here only other real role, that is horror based, is Bates Motel. I hope she sticks to horror TV shows and gets out of these terrible movies before she has no career.