Can a movie that manages to have every single aspect within it be awful, also be the best piece of cinema you’ve ever laid your eyes on?
“Love Beat the Hell Out of Me,” not to be confused with the 2000 film of the same name, released to Tubi on Feb. 7, 2023, would gain popularity later in the year as the face of the so-called “Tubi movies.”
Written and directed by Maurice Jones, “Love Beat the Hell Out of Me” very obviously seems to be an incredibly low-budget film, and that is very apparent from the title card in the opening minutes. But the film’s shoestring budget actually adds to the charm as we get to see tons of scenes shot in local areas.
“Love Beat the Hell Out of Me” stars actress Sherell Brown as Rene Jenkins and actor Lennox Blu as Antonio Jenkins, the main characters and the troublesome couple that we follow throughout the movie’s 77-minute runtime.
Typically, in a review of this sense, there would be positives to discuss by now, but those don’t exist in this movie. This film manages to fail so spectacularly at everything it does, yet you can’t look away for that exact reason, almost like a car wreck, except those can be accidental. This movie’s creation was a conscious decision.
The acting is atrocious from start to finish; every actor that was cast was outright terrible, but there are highlight moments where it’s so bad it’s entertaining, or someone gives a line in a gutbustingly hilarious delivery.
While no performance is good per se, Lennox Blu is easily the biggest highlight in the acting department as he gives such an eccentric performance for Antonio. Without spoiling the plot, Blu essentially has to play two completely different versions of the same character in each half of the movies, and in the second half, he ramps it up to 11 and steals almost every scene he’s in.
The story, however, is awful and gets completely nonsensical due to a major plot hole in the middle of the movie, and the dialogue is just abysmal.
The story revolves around the tumultuous relationship of Rene and Antonio, which spirals down the drain as Antonio isn’t the man Rene thought he was. Even a scene where the film decided to have the characters talk about something we just saw minutes ago.
Here’s the worst piece of both context and writing in the whole movie to sum it up. While in a chicken shop, one of Rene’s friends asked the teenage-looking worker if he had ID with him and proceeded to hit on him while he was walking away.
Now with everything being said and all the negatives discussed, this may be the greatest piece of cinema released to the public. I thank Maurice Jones for making it, and I thank Maverick Entertainment for distributing the movie.
This movie does everything it can do wrong, and this is said without exaggeration. The acting, music, plot, dialogue, cinematography and audio are all an affront to filmmaking, and for that reason alone, this movie is worth watching.
It is the worst movie in many regards, and it’s a masterpiece because of it.
9/10.