Written and Directed by Karl Holt
Starring Karl Holt, Claire Cartwright, George Collie
Rated TV-MA
Runtime: 1 hour 34 minutes
In theaters May 7, on demand May 11

by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

There’s a whole genre out there built around nostalgia. I call it, perhaps cynically, “empty nostalgia.” It’s the kind of movie or show that seems to be a series of “remember this?” moments. “Do you remember this show? This song? This movie? That was cool, right?” It doesn’t have much else to offer other than that. It exists solely to showcase the filmmakers’ pop culture tastes.

Benny Loves You seems to be an answer to that genre and a call to let go and grow up. Not that adoring things from your childhood is inherently bad (or good), but building an entire genre around it, for god’s sake, is insufferable. Benny Loves You feels like the antithesis of things like Ready Player One, where you will be rewarded by developing an encyclopedic knowledge of movies and TV. Benny Loves You doesn’t seem to have the same wide-eyed awe of nostalgia.

The film is written and directed by Karl Holt, who also stars as Jack, the main character who must do battle with his childhood toy come to murderous life, and let go of the things that have held him back and kept him in a perpetual state of arrested development. Jack is 35, still living with his parents, coddled, and when a tragic accident kills his parents, he finds himself faced with the fact that he is a loser. He has no friends. He isn’t particularly good at his job, which has recently demoted him, and his ideas are nothing special. He has no money, his house is going to be lost, and he has to grow up, or he will lose everything.

A character like Jack is, oddly, refreshing. Usually in these movies about an adult man-baby who can’t seem to let go of his pampered childhood, they wind up being savants at this or that. Jack isn’t. Jack is every bit the loser the movie describes him to be. And because of that, we can identify with his jealousy toward the “villain” of the film, Richard (pronounced ra-shard, not rich-ard). Richard is like Ned Flanders from the early seasons of The Simpsons, where Homer hates him because he’s everything Homer isn’t: Hardworking, successful, genuinely loves his family, etc. A character like Jack works because it’s easy to be petty and it’s even easier to hate someone who is successful, especially if they’re already a bit of an arrogant ass.

Jack decides to start his life over, turn over a new leaf, and the first step is to throw out his childish playthings. His beloved toy Benny does not like this idea and comes to life and kills for Jack–people who cause him pain and people who love him. Benny is an indiscriminate monster, but Jack can’t part with it. He’s stuck in an abusive relationship with the thing and makes apologies for it whenever it kills again for him.

Benny Loves You is clearly a labor of love from Karl Holt and the film’s influences are clear. Jack reminds me a bit of Tim Bisley from the Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost show Spaced, minus the talent Tim had. The over-the-top gore with just a smidge of mean-spiritedness reminded me much of Peter Jackson’s early filmography, particularly Dead Alive. Holt also did much of the 3D modeling for the scenes requiring Benny to be CGI. It’s very well-made and shows a lot of skill for the craft of filmmaking.

The film, as a whole, doesn’t quite come together. It begins strongly and it sticks to the landing. The second act, a big chunk in the middle, doesn’t work for me. In establishing the relationship between Jack and Benny, it felt too repetitive, too many of the same gags were repeated. I don’t know how many times we needed to see Jack mopping up blood while someone else is just mere feet away. It worked well in the beginning, feeling like an exaggerated skit you’d see in an episode of I Love Lucy, but it felt run ragged near the end. At 92 minutes or so, it also feels too long. A movie like this walks a very delicate line and the script needed to be more refined. There are plot elements introduced and hastily tossed aside or sometimes completely forgotten. I think, also, Benny gets more than his fair share of screen time. Jack is the emotional weight of the story, and needed more time to develop his relationship with Dawn (Claire Cartwright), which actually has some of the movie’s best movies, including an oddly touching scene where they fall in love cleaning up the remains of a dead dog. Benny is, by design, annoying. He has three or four catchphrases he repeats with the same inflection, and he says them again, and again, and again, and again.

Benny Loves You is worth seeing, I enjoyed the message and the craft, but it feels like a missed opportunity and can be frustratingly uneven. The special effects, the direction and the performances are all strong, but for a horror-comedy, it’s not particularly scary, which is normally fine, because it leans so heavily into the comedy, but a lot of the jokes don’t land, either. It’s pleasant and silly, and I got a lot of smiles, but I don’t think I ever laughed out loud once.