Gimme All Your Lovin’
Alright, boys and girls, let’s do an experiment: What would happen if you ordered Barbarian from Temu, sorry, I meant Tubi? You get a Match made in Goofyland. Or, in other words: By going into this Tubi Original completely blind, without even having seen a single screenshot, and expecting the absolute bottom of the barrel, you’ll maybe have a pleasant surprise and have a fun schadenfreude time. And that should be my whole review for Match. So take care, thanks for stopping by, have a ghoulish night and happy Unholidays.
But if you’re still here, OK then…I’ve no better things to do either, so here we go: Here we meet the young woman, Paola, who’s searching for the sweet love via apps and whatever the kids are using today to communicate. After Paola has suffered through the one disastrous date after another, she finally finds a guy named Henry who matches her 93%. Well, if she thinks the previous dates were bad, she’s seen nothing yet. He even offers to serve her a home cooked meal on their date. What a true gentleman. Almost too good to be true.
There’s only one thing though — he has an autoimmune disease which makes him housebound. He also makes some bullshit COVID excuses for not wanting to go outside. Yeah, in the year of 2025. Paola’s sister, Maria, sees the red flags waving a mile away and begs her not to visit him alone at his home on the first date. So, it’s pretty clear early on that this is not the brightest final girl. But since love can be one helluva drug, she can’t resist. That home cooked meal must really be worth it.
After Paola arrives at Henry’s big upper-class house and rings the doorbell, she gets met by his mother, Lucille. Just the sight of her is another big red flag already. She’s ecstatic to meet her son’s date though, and invites Poala in to the point of no return. Poala gets drugged and wakes up strapped in a gurney as Lucille rolls her through some dark, decayed dim-lighted corridor filled with dead maggot-infested rats on mousetraps. Cozy. Again, that home-cooked meal must be something that would even give Gordon Ramsay an erection.
Speaking of erection… a terrified Paola gets rolled into a room where she finally gets to meat Henry (see what I did there?) but this is not the same Henry she’s chatted with. Huh. Instead, we have a morbid surprise that looks like if Sloth from The Goonies had a baby with Junior Gorg from Fraggle Rock while cosplaying as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. And he’s ready to fuck. Or just to quote Rammstein: You’ve got a pussy, I have a dick, So what’s the problem? Let’s do it quick.
And… I’m just gonna leave it here, because this absurd and sometimes icky horror comedy is just best watching without knowing anything about it, as mentioned earlier, even though how predictable it seems on paper.
What we also have here is an extremely sarcastic and welcoming commentary on the more and more delightful and soul-sucking online/smartphone society we live in ― filled with a sewer of apps (or digital cockroaches as I call it), mountains of uncanny face filters and future-faking that follows the most gullible NPCs all the way to their grave. And then we have the “shock values“ that includes a close-up with a monsterdick and a… mousetrap. What an interesting combination. I bet that Johnny Knoxville can relate.
And for those who got seriously traumatized after seeing a penis for the first time on the big silver screen in 28 Years Later earlier this year, this one will probably ruin your Christmas. Just a friendly warning.
But jokes aside, cuz this is so over the top and silly to almost a Looney Tunes level, that could as well be something straight from an average Troma film. The film gets more and more unhinged as it goes on with absurd, twisted dark humor with lots of lols, WTF-moments and questionable logic, while the main actress Humberly González seems to do the best she can to take this satirical clown show seriously. The film knows exactly what it is though, and so does Dianne Simpson, who plays the deranged Lucille, with a big dose of zany energy. The big star here (no pun intended) is of course the lover boy himself, the fake Henry, played by Jacques Adriaanse, buried under tons of layers with old school prosthetic makeup. And I’d bet there was a whole mini series of bloopers during the shooting. Not the best film of the year, but a surprisingly fun one with some eccentric charm.
Director: Danishka Esterhazy
Writers: Al Kaplan, Jon Kaplan
Country & year: South Africa, 2025
Actors: Humberly González, Shaeane Jimenez, Dianne Simpson, Jacques Adriaanse, Luke Volker, Nikita Faber, Dean Goldblum, Peter Butler
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37436190/
