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PLL: FFS

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pretty little liars summer school 2024

PRETTY LITTLE LIARS: SUMMER SCHOOL

1.5 Stars  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.

pretty little liars summer school 2023

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)

pretty little liars summer school 2023

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.

pretty little liars summer school 2023

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.

pretty little liars summer school 2023

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.

YA-BANG!

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never hike alone 2 2023

NEVER HIKE ALONE 2

3 Stars  2023/73m

Director/Writer: Vincente DiSanti / Cast: Thom Mathews, Vincent Guastaferro, Andrew Leighty, Anna Campbell, Vincent DiSanti, Lauren Wickel, Ben Kascandi, Bryan Forrest, Tracie Savage, Larry Zerner.

Body Count: 12

Never Hike Alone was the best surprise in 2017 – a Jason-centric half-length film that wasn’t amateur night; a stripped back, cut down, recollection of Friday feels. It worked. It worked better than some of the official instalments!

Three years later, a shorter prequel, Never Hike in the Snow debuted to rope in a couple of other Crystal Lake alumni for its world building and, another three years on, the closer-to-feature-length sequel rolls in.

Beginning before the events that ice off the first, poor Tommy Jarvis (Mathews, my favourite actor for the role) is still tormented by dreams that Jason Voorhees lives on. Working as a paramedic at Wessex County Medical Center (where Axel and Nurse Morgan met their grisly ends 40 years earlier), he sympathises with a doctor colleague, whose son is missing (the kid who hiked in the snow).

never hike alone 2 2023

When Tommy and two younger medics are called to help a delirious hiker rescued from the forest, we get to see Jason lay his workmates to waste all over again and then stalk after Tommy and Kyle as they head back to the clinic.

Local Sheriff Rick Cologne still sneers at the legends until he and his deputies come face to face with ye masked one when he shows up in the ER and takes most of the remaining cast out, leaving Tommy, Dr Hill, and Kyle to lure him back to Camp Crystal Lake to stop him for good. Again. But this fosters the long awaited re-utterance of “wherever the red light goes… ya-bang!” from Cologne against Jason… who’s bound to be receptive to that threat, right?

never hike alone 2 thom mathews vincent guastaferro

In terms of production polish, it’s remarkably on par with its brethren – drones really have transformed indie filmmaking! – and can boast an aesthetic that would fool Joe Public into being ‘just the next Friday the 13th with comparable ease’, although a series of bizarre on screen typos seems to plague it (see the news scroll that says ‘missing deputy believed to be among missing’!) Pernickety grammar fascism aside, we get cameos from Tracie Savage and Larry Zerner (from Part III) alongside actors from other Hike films and even other Jason fan movies. It’s like a little family is growing, hopefully to the point where whomever owns the rights this week takes their ideas onboard, as they’re doing a damn sight more with Jay.

never hike alone 2 tracie savage debbie

never hike alone 2 larry zerner shelly

Blurbs-of-interest: Thom Mathews was also in Final Summer; Anna Campbell was in Jason Rising.

“This shit ain’t cool!”

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final summer 2023

FINAL SUMMER

2 Stars  2023/83m

“In 1991, Camp Silverlake opened for the final time.”

Director/Writer: John Isberg

Cast: Jenna Kohn, Charlie Bauer, Wyatt Taber, Charlee Amacher, Myles Valentine, Jace Jamison, Ren Farbota, Ricardo Whitehead, Joi Hoffsommer, Thom Mathews.

Body Count: 11

Laughter Lines: “This whole thing just kinda feels like a horror movie; the whole let’s split up and search for the missing kid in the woods.”

Ode to Friday the 13th begins with a double murder at Camp Silverlake in 1986, then leaps five years where the accidental death of a child (named Mason!) during a nature hike is the final nail in the coffin of the camp’s fortunes, but also the lives of the counsellors.

As they prep to close down for good, a stalker in a skull hood begins axing them one by one. Is it the child’s distraught father, who happens to be a troubled ex-employee? The killer from ’86? Or someone else?

Ultimately, the killer’s identity is blaringly obvious, although Isberg attaches additional revelations and an evident tribute to the source material.

The kitten-weak maniac falls over a lot, drops his weapon (nobody ever picks it up despite ample opportunity), fails to finish off several of the counsellors, and cuts a particularly unthreatening figure.

final summer 2023

Elsewhere, there’s lots of wandering around in the dark with flashlights, a blue hue over everything, occasional references to Jason, and a couple of creepy shots here and there, but regrettably it’s too insubstantial. The film appears kneecapped by its budget, evidenced in a string off off-camera kills, slow, clunky fight scenes, and unresolved questions, such as who the killer in the prologue was. A post-credits scene hints at something, but it’s still all too murky.

Thom Mathews appears for a matter of minutes as the local Sheriff, and look out for the bizarre Tom Atkins ‘cameo’.

The Final Girl Support Group

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fgsg

In recent years we’ve had the movies Last Girl Standing, The Final Girls, and the books The Last Final Girl and Final Girls, which are now joined by Grady Hendrix’s likely-best-of-the-bunch The Final Girl Support Group.

Across the aforementioned titles, what other stories are there to drill-down into in this sub-sub-subset of a sub-genre?

The title should clue you in to some degree; a group of women who survived various killing sprees in the 1980s gather for a regular trauma support circle, overseen by a potentially fame-seeking psychologist.

As is common, the players are largely named after actors or characters from across the genre: Marilyn survived a van trip in Texas in the 70s; Dani a Halloween night babysitting terror; Heather beat a killer known as The Dream King at his own game; wheelchair-bound Julia a post-modern small town murder spree by her boyfriend and his pal; and our narrator, Lynnette, is slightly looked down upon by the others for being more of an ‘unfinished victim’ when a Santa suit-clad loon skewered her on to mounted reindeer’s antlers. The group was founded by Adrienne, who offed the head of a killer who rampaged through Camp Red Lake in payment for the death of his son previously.

Yeah, that’s right, the most popular titles have been pillaged to provide the women their backstories. Most strikingly, Mrs Voorhees was changed to Mr Volker for Adrienne’s backstory, because Hendrix has presented a realm in which all killers are men, undoubtedly to compact the women vs. male-violence context in which the tale is told. He even begins the book with a paraphrased quote from Carol Clover’s essay Her Body, Himself that states “Boys die because they make mistakes, girls die because they’re female.” This never made sense in context – see this thing I wrote about just that comment. Still, their stories, which have each been made into film franchises, have been altered to reflect this, with mostly female victims featured.

When Adrienne is murdered, ever-paranoid Lynnette goes to ground, but finds her life under threat when someone has thwarted her various escape plans, including her Plan Bs and Cs… She goes on the run, seeking help from the others, who are then sent the less-than-flattering private manuscript she wrote about the support group. But then Dani is arrested, Heather’s abode is burned down – someone is coming after them from all angles. Lynnette ends up chasing down clues, taking a ‘junior’ final girl with her, meeting with a ‘fallen’ member of the group who deals in true crime merchandise, and ultimately having to gather the gang for a ride or die confrontation with the person behind it all.

The first half of the book is hard going, not least because the characters are largely miserable and twisted, with Lynnette being the least sympathetic, but it all comes together in time, culminating in a neat mirror image of slasher characters: Each of the final girls have become one of either the jock, the scholar, the (ugh) ‘slut’, the stoner, which makes for some interesting counter-theories. One sorely lacking aspect is any notion of camp – not that Hendrix should’ve gone all-out parody, but the story is so po-faced throughout it’s wound-strong narrative, some levity would’ve done wonders.

A real page-turner if ever there was one, but it’s worth noting the book, as a whole, is not a slasher opus unlike most of its kin, and goes deeper into the themes around final girl-dom than the others, though Riley Sager’s book is closest in plot. It’s due to be made into a TV series in time.

Mish/Mash

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they/them 2022

THEY/THEM

2.5 Stars  2022/104m

“Fear doesn’t discriminate.”

Director/Writer: John Logan / Cast: Kevin Bacon, Carrie Preston, Anna Chlumsky, Theo Germaine, Quei Tann, Austin Crute, Anna Lore, Monique Kim, Cooper Koch, Darwin del Fabro, Hayley Griffith, Boone Platt.

Body Count: 7

Laughter Lines: “I keep expecting Jason Voorhees to come out of these woods.” / “Who?”

Some spoilers.

A lone female gets a flat on a backroad and is attacked by a masked psycho. Same old, same old. The aerial shot pans onward and shows us Whistler Camp, a conversion center for non-heterosexual teenagers, a busload of which arrives in the morning to be greeted by head counsellor Kevin Bacon, in a nice throwback to his never-actually-got-to-do-the-job role of Jack in Friday the 13th.

An assorted group of campers are initially divvied up by gender, which is an issue for non-binary Jordan, who is sweet-talked by KB into the boys’ cabin, and later joined by transgender Alex, who is turfed out of the girls’ block when one of the creepy staff spies on her in the shower.

they/them 2022

Therapy sessions ensue, both in group and with creepy ‘doctor’ Cora (Carrie Preston, who is perfectly unhinged), the girls bake pies, the boys learn to shoot, hook-ups occur and, after what feels like forever, the masked loon reappears and offs an ancillary staff member. Shortly after, the camp’s thinly-veiled sadistic practices begin to show through. The kids decide they want out, and the killer starts to up their game.

As a slasher movie, They/Them (‘They-slash-them’, geddit?) is a bit of a spectacular failure. The killer is obvious from the moment they’re introduced, and their intent to ‘cleanse’ the camp from continuing to do the damage it does, while admirable, renders them largely unthreatening as the campers are off the hit-list, with only the rather one-dimensional counsellors at risk of being slashed to neatly trimmed ribbons. And they’re hypocritical assholes as it is, so why even care?

they/them 2022

The more relative horror in They/Them comes from the invasive in-roads made by the staff to assault their charges: Cora goes through personal belongings to play psychological games with Jordan, all but telling them to kill themself during a session, and the boys are forced to shoot the camp’s ailing hound dog to make them ‘real’ men. It’s disturbing, nicely realised (especially Preston’s leave-the-rest-in-the-dust performance), and sad when you think that such places exist.

The film was hailed as an LGBTQ+ empowerment tale in some places, which makes for some sweet moments between the characters, as they realise their support network is each other, although at times it feels forced within the span of the film and paves the way for a bizarre sing-a-long to Pink’s Fuckin’ Perfect, and some cringe-inducing Drag Race dialogue (I really do not need to hear “Step your pussy up” uttered anymore). It’s as if Logan becomes entangled in the hanging streamers of his plot strands, swinging dangerously close to celebratory musical mode, over to drama, then remembering he’s got a horror film to deliver, so cramming all of the slashing into what little time remains on the clock.

they/them 2022

It was probably a commercially wise decision to render the camp a religion-free zone, but, like the lack of threat posed to the campers, is something of a cop out. The persecution of gay folks is largely rooted in such beliefs and it would’ve been brave to call that out, but I can also see why Peacock didn’t want to go down that route given how extreme fundamentalists would probably mail them explosives with ‘groomers’ written all over it.

A tendency to fall back on to slightly stereotypical character attributes and repressed self-loathing means that I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this one, but it’s also hardly the train wreck it’s been made out to be. Probably would have worked better as a miniseries. HellBent needn’t worry about losing it’s gay-slasher crown just yet.

they/them 2022

Blurbs-of-interest: Bacon was also the lead in Hollow Man.

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