Afterlife of the Party Parent Guide

Although it’s difficult to turn a skill like “partying” into a career, Cassie (Victoria Justice) managed to convert her enthusiasm for excitement into steady work as a party planner. But that hasn’t abated her personal penchant for a good time, and her birthday is a perfect opportunity to cut loose. “Cassie-palooza” promises to be a week of non-stop parties – until the birthday girl drunkenly slips and smacks her head into the toilet. Waking up in the afterlife’s waiting room, Cassie learns that, unless she wants to go Down on the great elevator in the sky, she’s going to need to come to the aid of the people she left behind. The list starts with her best friend and roommate Lisa (Midori Francis), and then her heartbroken father Howard (Adam Garcia), and finally her estranged mother, Sofia (Gloria Garcia). The hard part? She only has five days to help everyone.

I have to give this movie some credit. It can’t be easy to find acting of this caliber outside of your average elementary school play. Or a script so full of cheap maudlin sentimentality that it could easily destroy an industrial shredder. Then there’s the music, which sounds perfect for a department store change room – read: deeply annoying. The filmmakers really left no stone unturned in creating a thoroughly terrible production.

It doesn’t help that the protagonist is a self-aggrandizing narcissist for the first half hour. She only starts helping people under threat of eternal damnation (or some deliberately vague but similarly unpleasant outcome). Somehow, self-preservation and regret give her the spine to try and help people for once in her existence, but it’s hardly a compelling moral tale.

Terrible as the movie is, I must concede that there aren’t too many content concerns here. Cassie’s binge drinking at the beginning of the film has about the direst consequence possible. There’s no real bad language or sex to speak of, and I’m hesitant to call someone falling into a toilet “violent”. But an absence of content concerns does not indicate a movie worth watching. Just because it isn’t openly objectionable or offensive does not make it good. While Afterlife of the Party struggles for mediocrity, I’m sure you can find something to watch that aims a little higher than the bottom of the barrel.