A D-grade horror thriller featuring bad acting and a wafer-thin plot, Becky the movie has four particularly gory and violent scenes.
Senior school student Becky (Lulu Wilson) is doing it tough.
She was close to her mum who died of cancer and she refuses to engage with her father.
Now he’s about to drop a bombshell that blindsides her.
He tells her he’s getting married to another woman, who has a young son, just as the pair arrive at Becky and her dad Jeff’s (Joel McHale) weekend lake getaway home, which he had originally intended to sell in the wake of his wife’s death.
Becky doesn’t want anything to do with any of them.
Meanwhile, a white supremacist, Dominick (Kevin James) has led a vicious, four strong prison break.
He and his gorilla mate, Apex (Robert Maillet) – whom he calls his son – turn up at Becky’s house as she is feuding with her father.
She’s gone off to chill out with one of their two dogs, but that leaves the other three people – namely her dad, her father's fiancé and the fiancé's son – in the house.
It is in the basement of that home that Dominick hid a secret key, which is what he is after, but when he searches for it, it is not there.
The one person who knows where it is is Becky, but she is not about to tell.
What she isn’t aware of at the time though is just how violent these men are.
Dominick, in particular, will stop at nothing to get what he is after.
Now it is up to Becky to become a one-woman vigilante force and fight back.
The basic contention – the set up – juxtaposing school fighting with a prison attack, was fine.
However, variously underplayed and overdone, much of the time I simply didn’t believe what the actors were selling … and that is obviously a problem.
A big part of my concern came down to the scripting by Nick Morris, Ruckus Skye and Lane Skye, which was like Swiss cheese.
I struggled with the concept of a newly minted teen “braining” two big burly blokes, let alone the other two smaller guys.
I also felt her “attitude” was put on.
Of the adults, only Kevin James was passably convincing with his menace.
Then “feasting” on the gore seemed strangely out of place. They appeared to be highly orchestrated “look at me” scenes, as if the filmmakers were saying “we are bad dudes and look what happens to bad dudes!”
Let me be a bad dude too and give Becky the movie a bare pass.
Rated MA and directed by Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion, it scores a 5 out of 10.