Just Add Pepper Movie Review

Peter Paul Basler's debut is simple and a little immature, but with this digital video production, he proves he can at least handle a camera, a crew, and a cast.

Basler's film embraces one of cinema's most notoriously simple plots: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. In this case, the boy is a kid named Pepper (Matthew D. McCallum) and the girl is Sarah (Jessica Gannon), his big brother's ex-girlfriend who has inexplicably been sending him postcards from her self-imposed exile in Paris. When Sarah returns, Pepper finds that she's undergone that post-graduate transformation: No longer a long-haired buxom beauty, she's now a short-haired buxom beauty... and Pepper thinks she might even have gone lesbian! Pepper and Sarah traipse away the days around their tiny town -- from the lake to the video store and back -- and eventually they become an item. For reasons not entirely clear they split up, only to face a last-minute reunion, naturally, at the end of the film.

Aside from cryptic plotting and lame jokes (the bathroom smells after Pepper's grandpa uses it!), the only real problem with Just Add Pepper is some truly awful acting (namely from giggling, line-blowing supporting characters) and its too-cute lead, who comes across a little too much like Freddy Prinze Jr. Jr. Gannon is a minor discovery, giving far more attention to her role than it probably deserves.