REVIEW - +1

There are two ways you can go with a high concept. Back or forward. To go back is to treat this concept as the destination of a journey, and the (as yet unexplored) journey as the design and structure of the concept, the working out of the equation, with the concept as the answer. To go forward is to treat this concept as a question, rather than an answer, and to see what kind of fun shit you can do with it. Invariably, this is very little, and the small minds that decided that the best thing to do would be to go forward with their high concept and make a movie out of it must now fall back on whatever they understand of filmmaking to fill in the gaps, like water being pumped into processed meat. When your movie is set at a teen house party, and you are one such small-minded filmmaker, you thus pump in all the cliches of teen house party movies, because you're not the sort to stop and ask why. After all, you took that high concept as the question, and didn't think to ask any of your own. At this point, if the script read any more than 'These annoying teens had an annoying house party the likes of which only occur in annoying teen house party movies', I'll be damned (N.B. if god even exists, I'm already damned, so what have I got to lose?!). Most infuriatingly, Dennis Iliadis doesn't even take the time to think his concept through, leading to all manner of logistical inaccuracies and inconsistencies which one might expect a film so reliant on such a concept to have a sure grasp on. What Iliadis was too busy doing to sort all that out, I'll never know, since the stupefying lack of originality in +1 would suggest that his hands were hardly full. And like a fart-flavoured palette cleanser after a main course of vomit, washing all this away is a flood of misogyny, colouring almost every turn in Iliadis and Bill Gullo's script. There's not a female character in this film who isn't principally defined by her desire for sex and/or her capabilities as a sex object, and few who aren't completely defined as such. There are two ways you can go with +1. Back out of it or forward into it. The filmmakers made the wrong decision. Don't you do the same.