Bravo TV is about to shine a light on North Texas with the April 11 premiere of The Real Housewives of Dallas. What kind of light, however, remains to be seen.
The network has revealed the cast, which includes Cary Deuber, Tiffany Hendra, Stephanie Hollman, LeeAnne Locken, Brandi Redmond, and Marie Reyes. E! Online has a preview that shows the pecking order, which already has been established.
"You know what happens when old-money meets new-money meets no-money," the entertainment site coos.
Deuber is a native of Connecticut and a nurse's first assistant who has gone on medical mission trips in third-world countries. She lives and works in Dallas with her plastic surgeon husband, Dr. Mark Deuber, and maintains her own aesthetic injectable practice.
Tiffany Hendra is the veteran actress, host, and model who's best friends with LeeAnne Locken and married to Australian rocker Aaron. Bravo notes she has a "troubling past" from her time in the limelight.
LeeAnne Locken is the former Miss USA Pageant competitor, who's had several parts in TV and movies.
Oklahoma native Stephanie Hollman is "the girl next door" and the mom to two boys. According to Bravo, for Stephanie to make her own money, her husband, Travis, writes up a list of chores for her to do while he's away on business.
Brandi Redmond is a former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader who married high-school sweetheart Bryan, and she's a full-time mom to two young girls.
Marie Reyes is an RN who owns and operates SkinSpaMED.
Alexandra Shipp, Lili Reinhart, and Victoria Perfetti in Forbidden Fruits.
There was a time when Dallas was a prime location for movies, whether it was for films set in and around the city, like Tender Mercies, or ones that used it to stand in for other locations, like Robocop. Dallas is getting its first notable shoutout in a long time thanks to the new film, Forbidden Fruits.
Set mostly in a NorthPark Center-like location called Highland Place Mall, the film centers on a group of young women known as the Fruits. Apple (Lili Reinhart), Cherry (Victoria Perfetti), and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) all work at a clothing store called Free Eden, with the three of them essentially lording over everyone else in the mall. That includes Pumpkin (Lola Tung), who works at the pretzel store Sister Salt’s and who wants to join their group.
Pumpkin soon discovers that, apart from being an entitled clique, the group also claims to be a coven of witches, with Apple especially using their combined power to get back at anyone who’s wronged them. When Pumpkin starts noticing Cherry and Fig going astray of the group’s code, she uses this knowledge to get in tighter with Apple, although she’s unprepared for how far Apple will go to protect her interests.
Written and directed by Meredith Alloway (who grew up in Dallas and graduated from both Lake Highlands High School and SMU) and co-written by Lily Houghton, the film seems to have the aim of combining movies like Mean Girls and The Craft. The peer pressure of being part of an exclusive group is evident from the start, as Apple essentially forces the others to live by her code or be ostracized (or worse).
One of the biggest problems the film runs into, though, is that any conflict comes from within the group itself. With no pressure coming from other friends, family, or co-workers, the group has to create its own drama. The story quickly gets redundant and stagnant, with almost no plot movement until the final act of the film, when it’s almost too late.
Alloway is clearly aiming for a campy vibe with the film, but the execution leaves something to be desired. The four characters are established in a perfunctory manner, and even as they get fleshed out as the film goes along, there’s nothing to compare them with, so it’s as if they’re just acting off-the-wall in a vacuum.
Those who know the Dallas area well will enjoy the local references (the women hail from Plano, Irving, Grapevine, and Highland Park), and Alloway makes sure to include the looming threat of a tornado into the plot. But since the film was actually filmed in Toronto, there are no visuals that make it feel like Texas, and so any goodwill she gets from setting the film in the city is muted by that lack.
While Reinhart (Riverdale) and Shipp (Storm in X-Men movies) have been around longer, both Pedretti (You) and Tung (The Summer I Turned Pretty) have made big impressions on streaming shows in recent years. The foursome play off each other well even when the story is not that compelling.
If there was a message in Forbidden Fruits that Alloway wanted to get across, she didn’t communicate it clearly enough. Her solid cast can only do so much to sell a story that doesn’t have enough on the bone to be filling. It would have been nice for the movieto be filmed in Dallas, but such is the way of the world in modern Hollywood.
