84 min | R | September 4, 2020 | Lionsgate
Randy Cockfield gets out of prison, discovers his best friend sold the family home, and decides the guest house is his now. He throws parties, wrecks the place, and dares the new owners to evict him. The squatter outstays his welcome, and so does the movie.
Randy Cockfield gets out of prison and finds his childhood best friend Blake has sold the family home. Randy decides he lives in the guest house now, and no buyer can make him leave. Sam Macaroni builds the whole film around a single joke. A washed-up party animal terrorizes a young couple by refusing to go away. The movie thinks the joke is funny enough to sustain a feature, and it is not.
Pauly Shore plays Randy as a fossilized version of his nineties stoner persona. He delivers every line in the same nasal whine and never finds a second register. Aimee Teegarden plays Sarah Masters with more commitment than the script earns, and Mike Castle plays her fiance Blake as a passive straight man who absorbs abuse for ninety minutes. Steve-O turns up as a drug dealer named Shredd and does stunts instead of acting. Billy Zane wanders in as Sarah’s father Douglas and looks like a man cashing a favor.
Macaroni directs from a script he wrote with Sean Bishop and Troy Duffy, and the staging never escapes the single location. The camera sits flat and centered on the pool deck, covering scenes in wide masters that kill any comic timing the editing might have found. The party sequences cut to thumping music and slow motion, the standard shorthand for fun that the movie itself never generates. Every gag lands with the same flat lighting and the same medium shot, so the visual rhythm flatlines early and stays there.
The film mistakes volume for energy and crudeness for transgression. Randy is meant to be a charming menace, but the writing gives him nothing beyond insults and bodily fluids. The couple at the center exists only to be tormented, and the movie sides with the tormentor without earning the affection. By the end the guest house is still standing and the joke is still the same one from the first scene.