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Diane (Tennille Taraszkiewicz) is a psychologist who's on the berge of
falling in love with Austin (Brian Boynton), a young and handsome patient
of hers, and the feelings appear to be mutual - best exemplified when he
kills a stalker (Harley Wallen) who's harrassing her, and she takes the
blame for it, and is let off on grounds of self defense. But she also has
an over-protective sister, Barb (Mandy Logsdon), who believes everybody's
out to kill Diane and applies all means of (self-)defense to keep herself
and Diane safe - even if her knowledge of how to defend oneself stems 100%
from mediocre slasher movies. And then there's Oliver (Matthew Santia),
Diane's assistant and gay best friend who's not at all fond of Austin for
purely unreasonable, personal reasons. So trying to have a quiet date with
Austin proves to be a tad difficult - even if one doesn't factor in
Diane's psychopath son, River (Todd Calvin De Pew), who wants his mother
for himself and tries to kill everybody who gets in his way - especially
his mother's lovers ...
Now it's quite obvious that If I Can't Have You takes
quite a few pages out of the Scream playbook - what with
Barb's obsession with slasher movies and her predilection for applying
"lessons" learned from them to real life situations. But that
said, If I Can't Have You is anything but a copycat movie, it's
actually a pretty well-written horror comedy that neither suffocates its
storyline in jokes nor just veers off into melodrama every now and again
but finds the right balance between humour and horror, also thanks to a
horror-savvvy direction. And a solid cast clearly in on the joke but not
playing it just for laughs only helps making this pretty funny genre
entertainment.
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