Twisted By Love (2024)

Bluesky can be a wonderful place. It’s a social media app where you can be social. Obviously. It hasn’t yet turned into the cesspool that so many social media apps have. It may still get there. It likely will. But, right now, it’s a way for me to connect, usually unsuccessfully, with other people. When I do connect with them, I end up in a situation much like the one I’m currently in.

See, I mostly follow people who like movies. That comes some name drops that I may not have been familiar with until they were mentioned by these people. It’s a way to discover movies, or to get recommendations. Not specifically for Sunday “Bad” Movies, but in general. Someone could share thoughts about how much they liked an under-the-radar 90s action movie or an 80s horror movie that got overshadowed by the big slashers of that era.

One thing I’ve noticed people discussing more, likely because of the oversaturation of streaming services and the rising costs to subscribe to them, is Tubi. You see, Tubi is currently a free ad-fueled streaming service. You go on there, you decide to check out something from their wide array of movies or television, and you click play. There are a handful of ad breaks throughout, but you get to watch the movie on your terms without paying anything. Everything costs more now and wages never rose enough to make up that difference in inflation. Capitalist societies are fun. Having a free option will give people a spot to watch things if they can’t afford the subscriptions.

However, the free option comes with a cost. You have to sit through the ads. Or, much like during the network television era of my childhood, you could always just get up and use the washroom or grab a snack instead of watching another insurance commercial. The other downside, for most people, would be the catalogue. For every decent thing that you might want to watch, Tubi has like five or six bottom-of-the-barrel movies or television shows. I’ve watched numerous Amityville movies there. I checked out The Octogames there. For this post, it was Twisted By Love. However, I’m still not at the point of talking about the movie.

That’s the downside of having a free option like Tubi. There’s some good stuff on the service, for sure, but you sometimes need to dig deep to find it among the slew of cheap stuff they could get to fill out their options.

Bringing it back to Bluesky, the people who use Tubi tend to be open about it. They know what they’re getting into, and they’ve grown an appreciation for the more questionable movies that pop up there. That’s where I find the discussion to be interesting. They mention things that I never heard of, pointing out exactly what might make it work or make it not work. They’ll share all the crazy new things they find on the streamer. Oh, did you know the Alf television finale made its way to the service? No, I didn’t. Thanks to the people I follow, I do now.

A little while ago, one of the people I follow started talking about Twisted By Love. I’m not entirely sure what provoked them to watch it, but they did. And they reported back that there was a scene where you heard the director talking to the actors about their performances and the scene. Not some sort of meta comedy or anything. Just a shot from between takes that was left in the movie. That got a few people curious, including myself. Most of them went solely to that one scene. Me? I had to watch the whole movie. That couldn’t be the only ludicrous thing in there. And it wasn’t.

Twisted By Love followed married couple Alex (Shawn Francis) and Lily (Dalisha Taylor) as they took a trip to a cabin with their friend Shaena (Kevonshay Pinky Donaldson). Over the course of their first day on the trip, secrets were revealed about a past between Alex and Shaena, and relationship bonds were tested as jealousy and betrayal ran high.

Things started rocky in Twisted By Love. It started with a scene from near the end of the movie, but quickly went back to the beginning, as the trio arrived at the cabin. Only, the cabin wasn’t a cabin. It was a random house in the middle of suburbia. Just a plain, old, residential house. Why did they decide to call it a cabin trip? I couldn’t tell you. It clearly wasn’t a cabin in the traditional sense. It wasn’t isolated in any way, whatsoever. It was your average house, and that’s it.

That wasn’t even the only odd thing about that scene. The thing that really tipped me off to how troubled the filmmaking of Twisted By Love would be was the sound design. Alex parked their vehicle in the driveway. He got out and there was a continuous shot as he closed his door, walked around the car, and opened the door for his wife. A little unnecessary for a shot, but whatever. The kicker was that during his entire walk, where nobody was talking to each other, you could her rustling from inside the car. During the sound design, nobody thought to get rid of the sound of the microphone rubbing against one of the actors’ skin or clothes in the car. Not a great look to start off the movie.

Fast forward about fifteen minutes. There have been sex scenes already. There was one about six minutes into the movie. Well, maybe not a sex scene. There was a foreplay scene six minutes in. At fifteen minutes in, there was a dialogue scene that led into the first real sex scene. I mean naked body sex scene this time with bits flopping around, though everything was angled just right so you couldn’t actually see the flopping. Aside from Dalisha Taylor’s buttcheeks. That’s not the point. The point is the lead-in dialogue. The dialogue scene ended with a “joke” about Lily agreeing that if Alex bought dinner, he would get to pin her any way he wanted. It was a joke so good that when it was over, the movie cut to a completely different take of the same line. Two takes of the same dialogue put into the movie one after the other. It was as though they only had the master shot for the scene, liked the start of one take and the end of the other, and instead of cutting from the beginning of one to the end of the other, they left the overlapping dialogue. That’s not the way to edit a movie, let alone shoot it.

The main bit worth highlighting was the scene that got me interested in Twisted By Love. Half an hour into the movie, all three characters were at the park having a nice little lunch. They wrapped up and headed back to the car. Dialogue scene. When they walked off screen, you could hear the director end the scene and ask them to reset for another take. All three actors then broke character and started talking about the scene and joking around. Eventually, the director called action, the actors got back into character, and they ran through the scene again. It was one of the most baffling things I’ve ever seen in a movie.

One final moment I want to bring up is a spoiler for the end of Twisted By Love. If you care about watching this movie at all, maybe don’t read this paragraph. The climax of everything came when Lily ran out of the cabin to a nearby playground to get away from the relationship drama caused by having Shaena around. Of course, Alex and Shaena went to the playground to check in on Lily. A little tussle happened and Shaena fell onto the bottom of a slide in the safest looking roll over the side I’ve ever seen. But it caused her brain damage, which then led to the tension of covering up the potential death or going to the police and being harshly punished for it because they were black. That debate was good enough. The fall onto the slide, however, was just one more poorly done moment in the movie that made me question if it was real. Was I being trolled?

The rest of Twisted By Love was an underwhelming relationship thriller. It went to some dark places by the end, with characters going to great lengths to resolve the love triangle that was festering like a bad wound. But it wasn’t exciting. It wasn’t good. It was poorly built and left the thrilling part of the thriller out. Outside of how poorly made it was, there wasn’t much to take away from this bottom of the barrel, streaming on Tubi movie.

The only reason I knew about Twisted By Love was word of mouth. That word of mouth was actually word of fingertips came courtesy of the fingers of the people on Bluesky who I follow. Had they not mentioned the movie, I never would have known about it. It wasn’t in my algorithm. It wasn’t something I was likely to stumble across as I went from streaming service to streaming service. I can only find so many things on my own. But I found this, all because some people live and die by using Tubi.

Why is that? It’s a free option for streaming movies, when every other streaming option seems to be charging more and more. How expensive will Netflix get? Or Disney+? Or Paramount+? You never know. They just keep hiking the prices up, even for ad-supported tiers. Who doesn’t do that? Tubi. Tubi lets people watch everything for free, just with some ads scattered throughout. That’s the way it should be. Charge for premium tiers without ads. Don’t charge for tiers where the ads pay off the subscription tiers. I’m not the only person feeling that way, hence the people who have found Tubi and love Tubi.

Those people also talk. They’re the same people who would pay to see a relatively unknown movie on the big screen and tell you all about how you should be checking that one out. They’re the kind of people you should trust because they’re the kind of people who have an open mind. They can find the diamonds hidden in the rough. They can find the gems of movies you might not know about. They will also find the terrible stuff that’s just so bad that you wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it yourself. These are my kind of people and this is the reason I love social media, even if so much of it is a hellscape.

Now for a few notes to close things out:

• Twisted By Love had no connections to any other movies I’ve watched for Sunday “Bad” Movies, so I’m just going to drop links to some random posts that I feel like dropping links to. The Lair of the White Worm, Stone Cold, The Legend of Sorrow Creek, and Breach. I mentioned The Octogames in this post, as well.
• Have you checked out Twisted By Love?  Have you seen any movies make mistakes as big as this one did? Let me know whatever you’re thinking by posting in the comments, or contacting me on Bluesky or Threads.
• You can suggest movies for me to watch in the comments, on Bluesky, or on Threads. I’m open to discovering movies I might not already know about.
• Looking ahead to the next post, I’m going to be checking out a movie called Killer Sofa. In fact, I’ve already watched it. If you want to see my thoughts about it and, maybe, a few other movies, that post will come out sometime soon. It might be next week or the week after. Keep an eye out and I’ll see you then.