Parents' Guide to Habit

This dark comedy is likely to offend faith-based viewers, and it quickly grows tiresome for everyone else. Habit is a '70s style (in fashion, taste in vehicles, and movie influences) film in which three attractive young women go into hiding as nuns after one of them loses the money from a drug deal. It's very '70s in the colors and hairstyles and pretty much everything except the use of smartphones. It's a movie with painfully obvious influences that make this excruciatingly derivative, even as it's trying to make some kind of comment on sexualized feminism in the face of a patriarchal society best symbolized by Christianity. No attempt to mock religion or Jesus Christ and Christianity goes undone or unsaid. Those guaranteed to be offended by this will turn it off within five minutes, and everybody else will eventually get bored.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the movies of Quentin Tarantino, John Waters, and Russ Meyer will see this for what it is. Surf music interludes, bad taste in various forms, attractive women in go-go boots -- Habit draws on these influences and tries to filter it through a feminist perspective, and while it's an admirable ambition, it just doesn't work. The budget is too big to come across as the lark of the low-budget '70s movies that inspired this, and the self awareness is too obvious. The characters aren't especially likable, which is fine, but then it's hard to feel sympathy when they're trying to survive in the dark side of Los Angeles as chronicled in the music of, say, Guns n' Roses and Red Hot Chili Peppers. The humor doesn't work and comes across as glib and smug, and the secondary characters are archetypes or stereotypes seen in so many movies before. This is a tedious exercise in bad taste.