A DELICIOUS, NIGHTMAREISH ONION! Netflix’s Brand New Cherry Flavour is an extremely assorted experience.

I am an enormous fan of David Lynch and the new Netflix series Brand New Cherry Flavour simulates a world conceived directly from inside the kooky one’s own cortex. When I heard that the Todd Grimson novel was being adapted for Netflix I was pretty excited to see what they would come up with. I had read the book while I was in university because my writing professor had recommended it to me, along with American Psycho and Truman Capote’s In True Blood. The novel itself is something pretty special and this miniseries in it’s own right, is equally extraordinary, covering only a very small percentage of the book’s content. Minor character’s have been upgraded for this production with it’s narrative relying primarily on the enhancement of the character Lou Burke and his devious betrayal of the central star, Lisa Nova. Amping up his role allowed the show’s creators Lenore Zion and Nick Antosca to expand on the vengeance storyline. The other central characters have been altered quite a bit in this version, giving them new dimensions and changing the focal point of the story quite a lot. If you have read the book prior to watching this series, try to disconnect from that as much as possible. View the show as it’s own entity, which is what I have tried to do.

Lisa Nova is a fantastic character portrayed with perfection by the equally fantastic Rosa Salazar. She’s fiery and sassy and very likeable. She’s an aspiring director who’s short film has somehow landed in the hands of Hollywood producer Lou Burke. He likes what he sees and reaches out to her wanting to produce the film as a feature. He promises she can direct and lures her to sign a contract deceptively, waiving her legal ownership of it and any rights she previously had. She then meets the mysterious Boro at an event where she then learns of Burke’s treachery, thus sparking the flame and launching her decent into a very dark underworld. The evolution of Boro is not only alluring but also ghastly and she swiftly becomes THE villain to contend with. Then of course there’s Roy Hardaway, the handsome movie star who develops feelings for Lisa as he valiantly aids (and abets) her every ludicrous demand. Roy carries a certain mystique in the series, and a death wish.

The story is a lurid allegory of exploitation nestled warmly inside a twisted nightmare. Lisa Nova is by no means a heroin, and for each of the character’s agreeable traits there are an even greater sum of unscrupulous attributes just to tip the scales. But this only adds to the appealing features of the show making the hell-ride of sabotage and destruction a bloodied, unzipped experience where the viewers are uncertain of who to root for or to wish a certain, gory demise upon. There are some supremely violent sequences, some based in reality, others in a twisted realm of hallucinatory torment. Then of course there is the just plain gross; aka the vomiting up of kittens. The kittens are symbolic for various reasons, one of course being the connection to Boro and her Jaguar story she later unveils, which is then connected to Lisa’s mother, who of course abandoned her as a baby. The symbolism is rife throughout the show, with another prime and obvious example being the short film Lisa made titled Lucy’s Eye in which a woman gauges out her own eye in a frenzied state. The actress who’s name is Mary actually gauges out her own and eats it while extremely high on Peyote during the scene. Mary then seeks her own vengeance on Lisa for abandoning her afterwards; “an eye for eye” as the metaphor goes.

The final episode brings very little closure for the lovely Lisa, with most of her friends now dead and with Boro planning to literally embody her. Lou looses his vision (another metaphor) and although she gets her film back technically, she chooses to flee Hollywood and return to her native Brazil, indefinitely. It seems like an extremely weak and unsatisfying finish to what has been 8 episodes of mayhem and sufferance, but then we see that Boro has taken residence in Mary’s body and we soon realize that Lisa’s ‘nightmare’ is merely taking a hiatus with the possibility of a To Be Continued tagline, perhaps. I enjoyed this series for what it was, a horror show set in (again) the 1990’s, laden with nostalgia, saturated with blood and anchored in delirium. It wasn’t faultless but it was entertaining and it was good to watch something a little unconventional for a change.