PLL: FFS
PRETTY LITTLE LIARS: SUMMER SCHOOL
2024/383m
“It’s gonna be a killer summer.”
Created by: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa & Lindsay Calhoon Bring / Cast: Bailee Madison, Chandler Kinney, Zaria, Malia Pyles, Maia Reficco, Mallory Bechtel, Alex Aliono, Jordan Gonzalez, Derek Klena, Ben Cook, Ava Capri, Antonio Cipriano, Noah Alexander Gerry, Annabeth Gish, Elias Kacavas.
Body Count: 9
Laughter Lines: “Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you in the middle of a full-on spiral?”
Six months after the Millwood Massacre, the sisters-in-horror Imogen, Tabby, Faran, Noa, and Mouse have been taking self-defence classes, group therapy (with a therapist who utters such wondrous insights as “I’m hearing frustration” and “I’m sensing some anger”), and, much to their chagrin, summer school, as they all flunked. All of them. Remember, this group can’t possess an outlier, everything has to align. With Millwood High giving zero fucks about what happened to them, their ‘hot girl summer’ is cancelled.
Clearly their stupidity isn’t restricted to academia, as they’re fucking collectively dumb enough to stand in front of a mirror and chant ‘Bloody Rose’ five times after an over-referenced website named Spooky Spaghetti (make a drinking game for how often it gets a mention and you’ll rapidly be off to A&E with alcohol poisoning) reports OG killer ‘A’, skinned his mother’s face, and so now she’s back for revenge blah blah blah. But why? The five of them had fuck all to do with what originally happened to any of these people anyway.
One by one, the girls are ‘tested’ by Bloody Rose, even after swearing they’d share everything with one another, they persist in venturing off to investigate old cabins, homeless encampments, deserted stores, and hang out with new pop-up boyfriends who turn up out of the blue and are immediately trusted. So much so that more than once the girls sit around and discuss their sexless sleepovers before updating each other on the person WHO. IS. TRYING. TO. KILL. THEM.
(Who is the killer? Think Scream 2, they’ve just about Xeroxed it)
Elsewhere, a local religious cult is hoovering up teens, including mutual acquaintance Kelly, whose mom has gone all Margaret White, and Faran’s surprisingly not-gay dance partner; then the girls get jobs, but relatively high-powered ones, considering they’re supposed to be fifteen and sixteen years old: Tabby is made manager of the cinema, while Faran becomes lifeguard captain at the pool after out-swimming the boys and beating them in arm-wrestles, even though their biceps are larger than her entire torso. A recurring theme through Summer School is that all males are inferior to the five leads and must apologise to them on every available occasion.
There are few bright spots – one of the girls is chased down a path of thorny rose stems during a Friday the 13th marathon at disused summer camp, and the score from Part 2 (rightly declared the best one by Tabby) is used to soundtrack her attempted escape. The infrequent murders are liberally bloody, and the finale with one of the girls on the run goes well, but none of the victims are main characters, so why even care? The stakes barely register.
Not-so-subtle horror references are dropped incessantly, with the cinema reportedly playing nothing but 80s horror flicks. For all Tabby talks about the genre, the core five repeatedly fall foul of just about every cliche in the book. Worst line in this regard: “Final girl energy Laurie Strode realness!”
By a huge distance though, the main problem here is the group itself. They’re no longer likeable, put-upon youngsters banding together against bullies and a wacko. They’ve become an insufferable clique of entitled brats who excel in group hugs and speeches about sisterhood (“All for one and one for all!”) but, for anyone outside of the fold, come across as bullies in their unrelenting efforts to get their own way, and repeatedly assert their dominance over any and all menfolk. It’s got a very embittered and exclusive tang to it, all the while the characters parroting inclusivity without any realistic gestures on their part that don’t happen to serve their own needs, and managing to lecture various bit-parters on how they should conduct themselves.
Mercifully, plans for a third season were cancelled after this disaster.
Blurbs-of-interest: Showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa wrote the screenplay for the 2014 Town That Dreaded Sundown.
2023/83m
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