- Title: Spread
- IMDb: link
After losing yet another job, being cut-off from her father (Diedrich Bader), breaking up with her boyfriend (Jonah Platt), and having no marketable skills, Ruby (Elizabeth Gillies) takes a short-term job as a temp for a struggling pornographic publishing house where her aggressive personality catches notice of the magazine’s owner (Harvey Keitel) in need of a major gamechanger to save the company. Tasked with creating an app while struggling to work in an industry she doesn’t respect or understand, Ruby eventually becomes invested in helping the magazine and preventing a corporate douchebag (Tim Rozon) determined to shut it down.
For a movie about making pornography, Spread is pretty tame stuff. Other than the several shots of characters holding or discusing dildos or a couple shots of porn being shot with fully clothed actors, there’s hardly anything risque despite what the premise may suggest.
That said, Spread has some charm (mostly coming from Gillies finding herself slowly invested in the job she never wanted and Bader as the father who is ecstatic with his daughter’s career change). And Keitel gives a performance far better than the script deserves.
We also get a romcom angle thrown in with one of Ruby’s coworkers (while a separate coworker crushes on her for nearly the entire film). Even if the script requires characters to consistently work against their own self interest (such as Bryan Craig as Ruby’s asshat of a coworker), it’s certainly more entertaining than many of Tubi’s other original movies. While it’s probably going to be too tame for the audience its premise is likely garner the most interest from, there is a perfectly fine B-movie here for the right audience.
Watch the trailer
