Hungry for Revenge.
"I want to set his life on fire."
— Lisa Nova
Brand New Cherry Flavor is a Netflix Supernatural Fiction Horror series created by Lenore Zion and Nick Antosca, based on the novel by Todd Grimson. Set in Los Angeles during The '90s, it follows aspiring filmmaker Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar), who has arrived in Hollywood after her short film attracts the interest of bigshot producer Lou Burke (Eric Lange), who tells Lisa that he wants to expand it into a feature. However, when Lisa spurns Lou's sexual advances, he steals the film's rights from under her and proceeds to cut her out of the production. Desperate for revenge, Lisa strikes a deal with a mysterious witch named Boro (Catherine Keener), placing a curse on Lou that begins to have creepy - and horrific - effects on both Lou and Lisa. The series combines neon-soaked noir with copious doses of Body Horror and Black Comedy.
The series, which also stars Manny Jacinto and Jeff Ward, premiered on August 13, 2021.
Brand New Tropey Flavor:
- The '90s: The series is stated to be set in "the early nineties", although a definitive year is not actually given.note
- Abhorrent Admirer: Lou to Lisa. It's the main reason why things sour between them so fast.
- Adaptation Distillation: The miniseries only covers the first 95 pages of the book.
- Affably Evil:
- Boro. She's always charming, polite, and cordial to people, even if she's planning to do horrible things to them.
- Although less "evil" and more just "asshole", Lou comes across like this as well. He may be a colossal prick, but he's usually pretty polite and reasonable.
- All Witches Have Cats: Boro has many of them, and drinks their blood.
- Amicable Exes: Lisa and Code. Code even says that they’re Better as Friends.
- Asshole Victim:
- James, the scumbag thief that Lou ultimately hires to kill Lisa. Suffice to say, having his head nearly torn off by Lisa when he goes to try and kill her the second time is pretty damn satisfying.
- Also Lou, although he occasionally subverts this, mainly because he: A) genuinely saw the potential in Lisa, but couldn't help indulging his desire to get in her pants, and B) genuinely loves and wants to protect his family.
- Also Lisa herself. Yes, Lou stole her movie and cut her out, but her revenge against him really went too far and involved many people outside of her revenge target, Lou. This causes Lou to go to further extremes to take Lisa out, like hiring someone to kill her and hopefully put a stop to whatever is going on.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Taken to extremes with Lisa, after she's brutally beaten and left for dead. Despite suffering massive injuries, after a couple of rounds in Boro's healing milk bath, she emerges without a scratch on her.
- Big Bad: Although the show seems to set up Lou in this role, it's actually Boro.
- Body Horror: All over the place, and nearly all of it being beset on Lisa. It starts with her vomiting up live kittens after making the deal with Boro, and just gets weirder from there.
- Bittersweet Ending: Lisa manages to stop Boro from taking over her body, and does get her revenge on Lou, rendering him blind, helpless, and living with the knowledge that his actions ultimately led to his son's death. Alvin Sender even buys Lucy's Eye and offers Lisa the directorial gig. However, Code, Christine, and Roy are all dead, and Boro escapes by taking Mary's body, meaning that she's still out there somewhere.
- Body Surf: Boro engages in this, taking over the bodies of other women. Lisa was going to be her next body, but after Lisa foils her plans, she moves on over to Mary instead.
- Black Comedy: Quite a few examples of this. A lot of it comes from Boro, but there are also a few scenes involving Lisa that are pretty damn funny, such as her eventual nonchalance to vomiting up kittens.Lisa: Do you need a kitten?
- Casting Couch: Although she's not an actress, this very much applies to how Lou approached Lisa, basically admitting that if she had just had sex with him, he would have let her direct the movie and helped catapult her career. And if some quick lines from Jonathan are anything to go by, this is apparently a regular habit of Lou's.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Lou's "The Final Cut" letter opener, which Mary later uses to kill Code.
- The worm inside the crushed powder that Lou mistakes for cocaine and snorts up. It's the final crux of the curse, causing all of Lou's nightmarish migraines, and Lisa removing it leaves Lou permanently blind.
- Cloud Cuckoolander: Boro, or at least, that's how she presents herself.
- Cool Car: Lisa's Pontiac Trans Am, despite being rather beaten up, still counts. Roy Hardaway has two: a Porsche 911 Carrera, and a classic SS Chevelle.
- Creator Thumbprint: Anyone who's seen a Nick Antosca series will be very comfortable with much of the show's imagery, featuring creepy Body Horror, disturbing-looking beings, oodles of surrealism, and heavy use of the Uncanny Valley. One reviewer even described it as essentially being "Channel Zero Season 5".
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Although it's a pretty well-known Truth in Television regarding the seedy underbelly of Hollywood, Lou's behavior with Lisa, promising to take her under his wing to mentor her to stardom, and then cruelly cutting her off and trying to sink her fledgling career because she wouldn't sleep with him, would definitely remind viewers of producer and convicted sexual predator Harvey Weinstein, who pulled the same tactic on numerous actresses (most notably Rose McGowan). Lou's speech and cadence are even very similar to Weinstein's.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Well, less evil and more an enormous jerk, but Lou does love his son Jonathan and is deeply worried for Jon's safety when he goes missing, and when he sees that Jon's been reduced to a zombie servant for Boro, he's genuinely heartbroken and devastated.
- Evil Is Petty: While Lou is not "evil" inasmuch as he's a major Jerkass, he definitely fits as all of his actions towards Lisa were motivated by spite for her rejecting his sexual advances.
- Eye Scream: The Series. Hell, just look at the poster above.
- What happened to Mary while shooting Lucy's Eye. When shooting the film's final scene, she actually tore her own eye out with her bare hands while high on peyote and ate it.
- This is also how Mary kills Code, stabbing him in the eye with Lou's letter opener.
- Not to mention Lisa pulling the worm from Lou's tear duct.
- Faceplanting into Food: When Lisa tracks down Boro's family (who haven't seen her since she vanished ten years prior), Boro cooks a spaghetti dinner for them and promises to explain what happened to her. It's all a ruse; she's drugged their food with a small amount of poison, and one by one they fall facefirst into their pasta, unconscious. She has to move her daughter's head to make sure she can breathe.
- Fatal Flaw: Everything that befalls him could have been avoided had Lou resisted his urge to try and sleep with Lisa and if he had handled her rejection in a more mature manner.
- Gender Flip: Boro is a man in the book and is played by Catherine Keener in the miniseries. Although in both, Boro is originally a man, and a woman is just the latest body he inhabits in the show.
- Grand Theft Me: How Boro has managed to live as long as she has, possessing the bodies of people who are implied to have some magical talent. She mentions that, after a time, their personalities fade into the background, and she all but confirms that she retains the body until it can't survive any longer.
- I Ate WHAT?!: This is Mary's reaction upon discovering what happened when she filmed the final scene of Lucy's Eye while high on peyote.Mary: I fucking ATE IT?!
- Karma Houdini: While Boro doesn't get exactly what she wants (Lisa's body), she still survives to the end of the series, takes on a new vessel in Mary, and moves on to continue doing what she's been doing for the past several centuries.
- Kick the Dog: Lou using Lisa's parental abandonment, which she confided in him earlier, against her for no reason other than sheer cruelty is a serious dick move. It's even implied this is what pushes Lisa to put a curse on him.
- Killed Offscreen:
- We don't get to see Lisa kill James, we just hear it from inside the wardrobe.
- Also, we don't get to see Mary kill Code, just the aftermath when Lisa finds the body.
- Manipulative Bitch: Lisa has shades of this, with both Code and Mary stating that she has a habit of regularly using and manipulating people to get what she wants out of them. It's implied that her entire relationship with Mary was merely a way to get Mary to trust her enough so that she would do anything Lisa wanted for the film.
- Meaningful Name: Boro, which just seems an appropriately kooky name for such a kooky character... until the revelation that she's a 900-year-old spirit that borrows people's bodies to survive.
- Not Good with Rejection: Lou admits that everything he did to Lisa, from taking her movie away from her and making her life hell, all came down to her rejecting his sexual advances.
- Not Worth Killing: In the final episode, after getting the answer to a question she had for Lou, Lisa ultimately decides against killing him and putting him out of his misery. It's also combined a bit with Cruel Mercy, as it also leaves him alive with the knowledge that his actions were what ultimately led to his life being utterly ruined and the death of his son.
- Off with His Head!: Roy's ultimate fate, courtesy of Boro's zombies.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Boro's cadre of zombie servants, who, despite being dead, still possess enough rudimentary intelligence to perform tasks and maintain a slight vestige of their old selves. This is due to their being the more old school "magic-based" zombies, as opposed to the modern virus-based ones.
- Sex Magic: After Lisa licks a poisonous toad in order to initiate a tracking ritual, Boro tells her the only way to finish the ritual is by Lisa indulging in this and Blood Magic. Lisa manages to persuade Roy to help.
- Villain Ball: Lou is ultimately the one responsible for the curse's success, due to willingly allowing Lisa to take some of his pubic hair (a required ingredient for Boro's spell that Lisa had failed to obtain) in a moment of hubris. If he hadn't, or if he had just waited another half hour, the curse wouldn't have been placed on him to begin with.
