Benny Loves You(2019)

Benny Loves You strives for cringe comedy and is 50% successful. Director Karl Holt has the ‘cringe’ part down, but he wouldn’t know comedy if it slapped him across the face – which is what a mother does to her small daughter early in this movie (leaving a handprint on the child’s cheek). Why exactly is this funny? Is it because the woman first asks in an internet forum whether “is it legal to smack my kid”? I mean, if you need to Google this, then you probably shouldn’t have kids in the first place.

How about this: The protagonist, called Jack, works for a toy company. He designs a toy and names it in such a way that the resulting acronym is AIDS; hilarity then ensues, except it doesn’t. Pray tell, how would something like this even happen? Can't Jack spell? Does he even know how to read? Is he somehow unaware of what AIDS means? Thus far we have deadbeat parents and illiterate toy designers; a pattern emerges, according to which incompetence is supposed to be funny. If this were so, Benny Loves You would be a riot, considering how incompetently it has been written.

Case in point; Jack and a colleague named Richard are vying for a promotion when Jack's parents are killed in a Final Destination-type accident. We then cut to “10 months later.” Jack and Richard are still competing for the same promotion. If neither of you has been promoted in almost a year, maybe it's time the both to give up hope.

At some point in all this nonsense, Jack’s childhood plushy Benny comes to life and goes on a killing spree. Why? Who knows? Maybe he’s mad because he has all the elegance of movement of wet toilet paper. If Benny had any sense, he would kill himself instead, because he has nothing going on for him – no personality, no motivation, no rhyme and no reason. He lacks both the charisma of a Brad Dourif-voiced Chucky and the mechanical dexterity of a Puppet Master puppet. There is no ‘how’ or ‘why’ to Benny; just a big, fat ‘what?!’.