Review: ‘Until We Meet Again’ (2022), starring Janel Parrish and Jackson Rathbone

April 27, 2022

by Carla Hay

Janel Parrish and Jackson Rathbone in “Until We Meet Again” (Photo courtesy of 1091 Pictures)

“Until We Meet Again” (2022)

Directed by Pece Dingo

Culture Representation: Taking place in Los Angeles, the dramatic film “Until We Meet Again” features a cast of predominantly white characters (with a few Asians and African Americans) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: A singer/songwriter moves into a haunted mansion, where she falls in love with the ghost of the famous pianist who used to live there. 

Culture Audience: “Until We Meet Again” will appeal primarily to people interested in watching morbid and wretchedly made ghost romance movies.

Leslie Jordan, Antonio Fargas and Janel Parrish in “Until We Meet Again” (Photo courtesy of 1091 Pictures)

It would be a disservice to call “Until We Meet Again” a “train wreck,” because train wrecks get people’s attention and need energy to exist. “Until We Meet Again” is just lethargic mush about a creepy romance between a male ghost and a desperate woman. Aside from the morbid aspects of this terrible movie, “Until We Meet Again” fails to be entertaining on any level whatsoever. Everyone involved in making “Until We Meet Again” should be embarrassed, but this garbage movie is such a flop, hardly anyone will see it.

Written and directed by Pece Dingo, “Until We Meet Again” (which takes place in Los Angeles) also has an awkwardly matched cast that lacks realistic chemistry with each other. The cast members in “Until We Meet Again” just recite their lines, with no credible emotional connection to their characters. The characters that are supposed to have relationships with each other never look convincing as people in relationships, whether they are supposed to be friends or lovers.

Lisa Wagner (played by Janel Parrish) is a 21-year-old pop singer/songwriter, who’s struggling to make it big in the very competitive music industry. The most she’s been able to accomplish is to get occasional gigs at small nightclubs. In the beginning of the movie, she’s part of a musical duo with her guitarist boyfriend Shane (played by Justin Gaston), who soon becomes her ex-boyfriend.

While Shane and Lisa are doing a very unimpressive and bland performance on stage, Lisa notices that Shane and a woman in the audience are lustfully looking at each other. After the show, Lisa sees Shane and this mystery woman (played by Erin Boehme) kissing each other passionately in a car in the nightclub’s parking lot. That’s the end of Lisa’s relationship with Shane, who pops back up occasionally in the movie to harass Lisa to get back together with him. Lisa refuses.

After this breakup, an emotionally wounded Lisa ends up housesitting at a Hollywood Hills mansion for an unnamed period of time. Details on who owns the mansion are never fully explained. Lisa vaguely mentions that she answered an online ad to housesit for a woman whom Lisa does not know. There are many unexplained and sloppily written aspects of “Until We Meet Again.”

Getting to live in this mansion is one of the few bright spots in Lisa’s life. Another bright spot is her best friend Tiffany (played by LeToya Luckett), who is the first person Lisa invites over to the house to show where she is currently living. Lisa says if it weren’t for this housesitting job, she would never have been able to afford to live in a place like this mansion. As an added perk for Lisa, the house has a grand piano that Lisa will play several times during the course of the movie.

Lisa tells Tiffany, who’s also single, that although Lisa was upset by Shane’s infidelity and having to break up with him, Lisa says she was never really in love with Shane, so it was probably all for the best that she and Shane are no longer a couple. To celebrate Lisa’s new living situation, Lisa and Tiffany smoke some synthetic marijuana (also known as spice) together. This drug activity is something that will be a factor later in the story when Lisa calls the police after she thinks a ghost in the mansion is stalking her.

On her first night in the house, Lisa sees a mouse and predictably screams. The next day, she sees the mouse again, so she calls an exterminator service. Two elderly men show up at her door. Their names are Louie (played by Antonio Fargas) and Angel (played by Leslie Jordan), who say they are “pest eradicators.”

Angel, who is feisty and sarcastic, seems to be the one in charge. Louie is more laid-back than Angel, but he and Angel seem to get on each other’s nerves. They also have an odd way of inspecting the house for animal pests. Louie uses a doctor’s stethoscope to listen to the walls, while Angel takes notes on a clipboard.

Louie announces to Lisa: “You’ve got a big rodent problem here ma’am. ” Angel then chimes in, “I’m sure it’s nothing we can’t handle.” Louie and Angel then start bickering with each each other. Lisa overhears Angel tell someone in the room, “There’s nothing for you here, except to bother the girl.”

If all of this sounds like a very dull scene, that’s because it is, but it’s intended to be one of the movie’s comedic moments, because Louie and Angel are supposed to be the “comic relief” characters. Viewers should actually dread seeing Louie and Angel in a scene because these two characters are painfully unfunny. The dialogue throughout this movie is simply empty and horrendous.

As an example of how this movie is badly written, Lisa never bothers to get details on what kind of extermination these two miserable clowns are supposed to be doing before they leave the house. Of course, it’s easy to figure out from the strange way that Louie and Angel are acting, they’re not really exterminators. (Angel’s name is a big, glaring clue that this dimwitted movie serves up with no subtlety.)

Lisa soon finds out that she’s got a bigger problem in the house than a random mouse: The house is haunted by a mopey ghost named Eddie Conway (played by Jackson Rathbone), a famous pianist who died in 1969, at the age of 20. Lisa first sees Eddie sitting at the end of her bed before he disappears. Lisa doesn’t know who he is at first, but she eventually finds out his identity. She not only discovers that Eddie used to live in this mansion but she also finds out something about his past love life that leads to a very cringeworthy part of the movie.

The first time that Lisa sees Eddie, she’s shocked and frightened. A panicked Lisa calls the police to report an intruder. The cops who show up to take the report are Detective Morrison (played by Michael Madsen) and Detective Yamamoto (played by Anzu Lawson), who don’t find anything suspicious and can’t do anything to help Lisa except take her statement. Detective Morrison is more skeptical than Detective Yamamoto.

Lisa encounters these two cops multiple times when she calls the police after seeing Eddie in her home again. And each time, the police get more suspicious that Lisa is hallucinating, because they think she’s on drugs and/or mentally ill. It doesn’t help when Detective Morrison finds Lisa’s stash of spice, which she promptly denies is hers.

In between these “ghost encounters” with Eddie and Lisa, “Until We Meet Again” has some tedious scenes of Lisa trying to get a record deal. The more she sees Eddie and the more she gets to know him (they eventually start talking to each other), the more she starts to fall for him and vice versa. And you can almost do a countdown to the scene where Eddie and Lisa start writing songs together.

Angel and Louie show up from time to time (much to Eddie’s displeasure), because Angel and Louie are on a mission to get Eddie to go somewhere with them. Eddie likes hanging out at the house, and he doesn’t want to leave. And besides, he’s got a romance going on with a living, breathing human being.

Shouldn’t Angel and Louie know the silly romance movie rule by now that a mismatched couple in love cannot be stopped? In a nonsensical movie like “Until We Meet Again,” that means Eddie and Lisa have got to find a way to make this love connection work between a ghost and a human who’s still alive. The rest of “Until We Meet Again” pummels viewers with this attitude: “So what if someone in this couple is literally dead? Is there a law against having sex with a ghost? Take that, Detective Morrison!”

By falling in love with each other, Lisa and Eddie are supposed to find happiness from the heartbreak they had before they met each other. It’s all handled in a way that’s not only off-putting but also incredibly slow-paced and dreary. Eddie and Lisa’s ghost/living person romance isn’t the only thing that looks fake. The characters of Eddie and Lisa do not look like their stated ages in the movie. Rathbone (wearing ashy white makeup) and Parrish are supposed to be portraying people in their early 20s, but Rathbone and Parrish look a least 10 years older than that.

Simply put: Everything about “Until We Meet Again” is a misfire. The direction is amateurish, the screenplay is horrible, the acting is weak and sometimes unwatchable. The only good thing to say about this odious movie is it’s such a turnoff, there’s no chance that there will be a sequel.

1091 Pictures released “Until We Meet Again” on digital and VOD on February 15, 2022.

Review: ‘Mighty Oak,’ starring Janel Parrish, Tommy Ragen, Carlos PenaVega, Alexa PenaVega, Levi Dylan and Raven-Symoné

July 7, 2020

by Carla Hay

Janel Parrish, Carlos PenaVega, Ben Milliken, Tommy Ragen and Nana Ghana in “Mighty Oak” (Photo courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment)

“Mighty Oak” 

Directed by Sean McNamara

Culture Representation: Taking place in the San Diego and briefly in Los Angeles and Minnesota, the drama “Mighty Oak” has a racially diverse cast (white, black, Latino and Asian) representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: A manager of an up-and-coming rock band is convinced that a guitar whiz kid is the reincarnation of her dead musician brother, who used to be in the band, but everyone around her is skeptical of that belief.

Culture Audience: “Mighty Oak” will appeal primarily to people who like sappy dramas and have low expectations for realistic storytelling.

Nana Ghana, Levi Dylan and Carlos PenaVega in “Mighty Oak” (Photo courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment)

The music-oriented drama “Mighty Oak” takes some heavy issues, such as drug addiction and mental illness, and throws them into an overly saccharine story that’s supposed to be uplifting but ends up being pandering and grossly unrealistic. Directed by Sean McNamara and written by Matt R. Allen, “Mighty Oak” might be enjoyable to children who are too young to know how dumb the plot twist is toward the end of the movie. But for adults who know better, this movie is downright cringeworthy in how it uses tragic deaths to further its manipulative agenda of trying to make audiences adore the kid who’s the movie’s title character.

In the beginning of “Mighty Oak,” band manager/agent Gina Jackson (played by Janel Parrish) is frantically knocking on the door of a nightclub dressing room occupied by her brother Vaughn (played by Levi Dylan), right before Vaughn’s pop-rock band Army of Love is supposed to take the stage. Vaughn is the group’s lead singer, lead guitarist and chief songwriter. He’s portrayed as one of those “undiscovered genius” types who fills up notebooks with his ideas and goes on writing binges whenever inspiration hits him.

And apparently, Vaughn has decided to write a song in the dressing room, making his bandmates and Gina wait for him to be ready to go on stage. Gina listens to the song and reacts as if she thinks it should be a No. 1 hit, even though it’s really a generic and forgettable song written for generic and forgettable movies like this one. The actor who plays Vaughn is the real-life grandson of Bob Dylan and son of The Wallflowers leader Jakob Dylan. In “Mighty Oak,” the filmmakers have stuck Levi Dylan in an ill-fitting obvious wig and have made him perform hack tunes that his legendary grandfather Bob wouldn’t be caught dead performing.

The other members of Army of Love are rhythm guitarist Pedro (played by Carlos PenaVega), Gina’s ex-boyfriend who’s still in love with her; bass player Alex (played by Nana Ghana), a sarcastic cynic who spends about half of her screen time rolling her eyes in annoyance; and drummer Darby (played by Ben Milliken), a goofy Brit who won’t be winning any intelligence awards anytime soon.

Gina and Vaughn are closer than most siblings are because they’ve been through a lot together. Vaughn and Gina became orphans when they were children, and they had traumatic experiences in the foster-care system. Pedro is very jealous and insecure about all the attention that Gina pays to Vaughn. But Gina’s fixation on Vaughn in the beginning of the story is nothing compared to the creepy obsession for her brother that she shows later in the story.

Army of Love has built up a following in the San Diego music scene (the group is based in the San Diego neighborhood of Ocean Beach) and has released a few independent albums, but the group hasn’t hit the big time. One day, Gina tells the band some exciting news: Army of Love has been selected as the opening act for Arcade Fire’s upcoming three concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

However, their excitement is short-lived when tragedy strikes: While driving on a freeway on the way back from one of the Arcade Fire concerts, the van carrying the band and Gina (and driven by Darby) gets hit in a head-on collision from a car driving the wrong way. Vaughn is killed instantly in the car wreck, while the other people in the van survive.

The movie then fast-forwards 10 years later. Gina is a drunk and a gambling addict who’s having a hard time paying her bills. Pedro works as a waiter at a local coffee shop/diner called Lestat’s, and he gives private guitar lessons as a way to make extra money. Alex works as a waitress at another local eatery—and she really hates her job, based on the miserable attitude and annoyed eye rolls she gives to a difficult teenager (played by Emma Ragen) who’s a regular customer. Darby works at a music store where he pathetically tries to get people to buy old Army of Love albums.

Lestat’s owner Dwayne “DB” Biggs (played by Rodney Hicks) owns the building where the coffee shop is located. The building’s top floor has apartments for rent. One of the apartments has recently been rented to a widow named Valerie Scoggins (played by Alexa PenaVega, who is Carlos PenaVega’s wife in real life) and her 10-year-old son Oak Scoggins (played by Tommy Ragen, in his feature-film debut).

Valerie, who has burn scars on her face and other parts of her body, is a military veteran who’s become an opioid addict. Therefore, she spends most of her days and nights in bed and zonked out in a drug-induced haze while surrounded by pill bottles and hypodermic needles. Oak has learned to become self-sufficient, and he’s essentially his mother’s nurse maid, since he serves her meals in bed and he seems to be the one responsible for cleaning their home.

At school, Oak has one close friend—Emma Biggs (played by Gianna Harris)—who is DB’s daughter. Emma is a loyal and protective pal to Oak. For example, when a couple of bullies at school tease Oak and steal his journal while they’re in the schoolyard, Emma defends Oak and gets the bullies to back off of him.

One day, DB mentions to Pedro that he let Oak borrow Vaughn’s best-loved guitar because the kid showed an interest in playing it. Pedro is a little annoyed that DB gave this guitar to Oak instead of to Pedro, but he’s curious to see if Oak (whom he hasn’t met yet) has any talent. Meanwhile, Pedro calls Gina to tell her that Vaughn’s beloved guitar is now in the temporary possession of a kid they’ve never met.

Gina is very upset by the news, not just because the guitar has sentimental value to her but also because the guitar is worth $3,000, and she was going to sell it to pay off some of her debts. Here’s a plot hole that’s never really explained in the film: What the hell was DB doing with Vaughn’s guitar? As Vaughn’s only living heir, shouldn’t Gina have been the one to own the guitar after he died? It’s shown later in the movie that Gina kept all of Vaughn’s possessions like a hoarder, so why didn’t she have that guitar?

At any rate, Gina wants to get the guitar, so she and Pedro make plans to meet up and try to figure out how to retrieve the guitar without hurting Oak’s feelings. Gina hasn’t seen the surviving members of Army of Love in several years, so Pedro is kind of thrilled to see Gina again. However, to Pedro’s disappointment, Gina makes it clear that she has no interest in dating him again.

When Pedro and Gina inevitably see Oak play Vaughn’s guitar, they are awed by the kid’s natural talent. (Tommy Ragen does his own guitar playing and singing in the movie.) Pedro offers to teach Oak some guitar lessons (with Army of Love songs as part of the repertoire, of course), while Gina notices that Oak’s guitar playing and other mannerisms are strikingly similar to what her dead brother Vaughn used to have.

Gina is even more convinced that Oak is the reincarnation of her brother when she sees Oak’s journal and finds illustrations that are exactly like what Vaughn used to have in his own journal. Even though Gina is spooked by these similarities, she sees an opportunity to get Army of Love back together and try to resurrect the band’s career.

Pedro is the first person she tells about her belief that Oak is the reincarnation of Vaughn. He’s very skeptical because of Gina’s troubled past: She’s a recovering drug addict, and she spent time in a psychiatric facility after Vaughn’s death. Gina has also attempted suicide at least once.

But he goes along with Gina’s plan to reunite Army of Love, with Oak as the band’s new lead singer/songwriter. When Alex and Darby find out that a 10-year-old is the new band leader, they’re less-than-thrilled until they hear Oak sing and play. However, everyone except for Gina thinks it’s kind of crazy to think that Oak is the reincarnation of Vaughn.

After Oak does a few rehearsals with the band, Gina and Pedro meet with Oak’s mother Valerie to ask her permission to let him be in Army of Love. Even in her drug-addled state of mind, she’s protective of Oak and doesn’t want him to be exploited. But since she’s a drug addict who’s always looking for more money, Valerie also wants to know how much Oak will be paid for his work.

Gina and Pedro admit that Army of Love isn’t making any money at the moment, but when they do start to make money, Oak will get his fair share. Valerie negotiates for Oak to get paid the same amount as Pedro. And then they all give handshakes over it, without any written contracts or even talk of consulting with attorneys first.

As dumb as this business “deal” is, it’s actually not too far off from how a lot of naïve people get ripped off in showbiz. What’s actually really stupid about the movie is what happens in the last third of the story. In order to believe the ludicrous plot twist (which won’t be revealed in this review), you’d have to believe that Gina, who’s so obsessed with Vaughn and how he died, didn’t care to find out anything else about the car accident that killed her brother.

The original music in “Mighty Oak” (many of the songs were co-written by Tommy Ragen) is middling and trite. Despite the filmmakers’ efforts to make Army of Love look like a “cool” band, it just comes across as a Nickelodeon or Disney Channel version of a band: A bunch of Hollywood actors with a newcomer kid actor trying to look like they’re in a believable rock band. Putting a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt on the kid doesn’t make the band any more authentic-looking.

And speaking of Disney Channel, former “That’s So Raven” star Raven-Symoné has a small supporting role as Taylor Lazlo, a friend of Gina’s who is a music critic at the San Diego Reader. Taylor’s San Diego Reader review of an Army of Love show with Oak as the lead singer will make AC/DC fans throw up a little in their mouths: She compares Oak fronting the band as better than how Brian Johnson replaced the late Bon Scott as the singer of AC/DC. Yes, the screenplay for this movie really is that bad.

Despite some of these real-life rock references in “Mighty Oak,” the movie is not realistic in many ways. The movie foolishly never mentions how Oak’s age is a real hindrance to the band. In real life, adults in a rock band wouldn’t want the credibility problems and liability issues of having a 10-year-old front the band. Getting band insurance would be a major hassle, for starters.

And a boy whose voice hasn’t even reached puberty cannot be believable when singing songs about romantic love. Therefore, a band with a very underage kid as a lead singer has to avoid doing any songs that are “adult” in nature, which makes Army of Love a novelty kiddie group with no rock’n’roll credibility.

The kid also wouldn’t be able to go into places where the minimum age requirement is 18 or 21, thereby greatly reducing the number of gigs that the band can get, since Army of Love is still at the level of performing in nightclubs. And unless the kid drops out of school, there’s no way that a child could be able to fulfill the time commitment it takes to be a professional musician who tours and records music.

Here’s an example of how out-of-touch the “Mighty Oak” filmmakers are with youth culture: In one scene, before the members of Army of Love go on stage, Gina chants the band’s acronym as a rallying cry: “AOL! AOL!” What? Not only could this acronym be confused with the AOL Internet service, but apparently the filmmakers aren’t aware that AOL hasn’t been cool since the 1990s.

“Mighty Oak” isn’t completely terrible. Some of the actors are better than others. The scenes between Gina and Pedro are the standouts because Parrish and Carlos PenaVega make these scenes believable. And there’s a somewhat funny recurring joke with one of Pedro’s untalented guitar students named Tristan (played by Thomas Kasp), who keeps popping up in his desperation to become a rock star too.

As for Tommy Ragen, it’s obvious that “Mighty Oak” is his first movie, and there’s a lot of room for improvement in his acting. In some scenes, he’s too melodramatic, while in other scenes, he’s too wooden. It’s clear that he needed better direction to overcome some of this uneven acting.

Several times in the movie, Oak does this gesture of placing his hand over his heart when he’s having a very emotional moment. It’s the filmmakers’ blatant attempt to make these moments into tearjerker scenes, and it just comes across as too slick and calculating for its own good.

“Mighty Oak” would have been a much more interesting movie if it hadn’t gone down such a predictable and boring path by the end of the film. If you want to see a great movie about an underage child prodigy from the San Diego area who experiences the lifestyle of a rock band, then watch “Almost Famous” instead.

Paramount Home Entertainment released “Mighty Oak” on digital on July 7, 2020.

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