MARSHMALLOW (2025) is a well made summer camp horror movie that manages the impressive feat of not really seeming like a riff on FRIDAY THE 13TH, SLEEPAWAY CAMP or THE BURNING (or for that matter CHEERLEADER CAMP, MADMAN, STAGE FRIGHT, CUB, or HELL OF A SUMMER). It does this in part by taking the kids, the parents and (to a lesser extent) the counselors seriously as characters and giving them relatable emotions before most of the horror movie stuff kicks in.
Morgan (Kue Lawrence, DEATHCEMBER, SKETCH) is a shy kid cursed with a horrendous bowl cut. In the opening scene he timidly approaches some taller kids who are aggressively passing a basketball around and asks if he can join them. They pretty much tell him to eat shit and run away while laughing at him. Morgan doesn’t notice this, but his grandpa (Corbin Bernsen, THE DENTIST) is sitting across the street witnessing the whole thing. So we feel both the pain of the kid and of the adult who’s gotta be torn up about what he’s seeing but can’t really intervene without humiliating the kid further.
At dinner you can see Grandpa trying hard to be there for Morgan, making him laugh, talking to him about the summer camp his parents are sending him to, trying to get him excited about it. Then he gets up to pour another glass of wine, clutches his chest and collapses. What a nightmare.
Oh yeah, also poor Morgan is plagued by literal nightmares, usually involving water spraying out of his chest. So there may be some water related trauma in the past, we’re guessing.
The scene where Morgan’s mom (Alysia Reiner, SIDEWAYS) drops him off at Camp Almar got me from a couple different angles too. Morgan is obviously nervous going off to this place, seeing how many other kids are already friends with each other, seem to know what they’re doing, have been there before. Also I bet he’s a little embarrassed by his mom being with him, worrying and caressing him and kissing him on the forehead, having to be told by the head counselor Rachel (Giorgia Whigham, The Punisher) that parents aren’t allowed beyond this point. Earlier I was annoyed by her over-protectiveness, but Reiner is so good in the scene, she really elicits sympathy from me with how much trouble she’s having letting him go.
A real problem: they stuck him in a cabin with this kid C.J. (Sutton Johnston, LOGAN LUCKY), a straight up bully who relentlessly picks on him, and trips him in front of everybody, makes him cry. When camp director Collins (Paul Soter, THE DUKES OF HAZZARD) brings C.J. into his office he just giggles like a little shit and nobody knows what to do about it because he’s tall and has bangs or something.
On the positive side a cute girl named Pilar (Kai Cech, DEAR SANTA) talks to Morgan right off the bat. I had flashbacks to being a shy kid and if some girl talked to me one time I would never get over it, but she in fact continues to be nice to him, they are actual friends, she tries to make him feel welcome. He offers the same for a kid named Dirk (Max Malas, 8-BIT CHRISTMAS) after the most jock-ish counselor Kaszwar (Pierson Fode, THE MAN FROM TORONTO) fat shames him in front of everybody. The solidarity between the non-bully kids in this is pretty effective.
This admittedly might be part of the “Stranger Things is popular so horror movies are about kids now” movement, but at least it feels solidly rated-R. It’s sort of a STAND BY ME approach to portraying kids – they’re pretty natural and they curse, not for comedy but because that’s how kids often talk.
That does bring up a question though of are we watching a summer camp horror movie where a bunch of bullied kids are gonna get chopped up? Is that gonna work? There’s a reason why FRIDAY THE 13TH and most of its sequels take place before the kids actually get to the summer camp. (Or why the winter camp got cancelled in BLACK PHONE 2.) This seemed like the reason to introduce a couple more cartoonish counselor characters, like Kaszwar (who shows off his muscles and calls kids names) and his hot girlfriend Laurie (Samantha Neyland-Trumbo, HORROR NOIRE) who mostly just wants to have sex. They make fun of the nerdier counselor Franklin (Maxwell Whittington-Cooper, John Lewis in RUSTIN), who seems to work hard to make the kids feel comfortable here.
There’s one part that mirrors a classic FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 scene, but both are based on a common camp activity: the kids sitting around a fire and the counselors trying to scare them with a local horror legend. Theirs is about “The Doctor,” who supposedly did abominable surgical experiments in the basement of a house that once stood where the camp is, and now sometimes you see him wandering the woods looking for his creations.
There are some well deployed horror techniques, and not the most obvious ones. After a horrific bullying incident the staff go out of their way to take care of the victims, but don’t really treat it like a serious incident, and I found it unsettling that I couldn’t tell if this was a plot contrivance or a sign that something is off at the camp. When Morgan wakes up and sees The Doctor cutting people open it’s shot like a dream sequence, but is almost immediately revealed to actually be happening.
That’s also where it loses me. I found this to be a real good horror movie when it’s setting up the horror, but when it’s revealed what the horror is I no longer thought it was cool. You had me taking all this shit seriously and now you’re telling me it’s just an episode of Goosebumps. LONGLEGS syndrome.
They were probly going more for GET OUT. I think it’s supposed to be About Something, but the leap from the believable world we were in to the sci-fi premise they abruptly throw at us was too much for me. I tried to jump and my fingers grasped the ledge of the other building but I could not get agood hold so I fell into a pile of garbage bags in the alley.
It’s kind of beside the point, but since this doesn’t turn out to be a slasher there are not really “kills” (despite having Robert Kurtzman and Marcia King [FUCK MY SON!] on makeup duties) and it doesn’t really do much with the actual location. An archery range is established, no bows or arrows are seen. Canoes are discussed as an escape method but not ever used. Actually, never mind, I kind of liked that because it was sweet that Dirk rejected the plan because of Morgan’s fear of water. And they do get a little bit of mileage out of the dark woods, with some eerie shots of the Doctor’s head flashlight in the foggy night. Still, I must face the reality that I would prefer this was just about some dude with a face like a burnt marshmallow stalking the woods. Been there, done that, but I prefer it to, uh… whatever you want to call this secret medical procedure idea.
But if you like the twist better than I did this would be a good movie for you. It’s the feature debut for Daniel DelPurgatorio, but he did several shorts and also TALES OF THE BLACK FREIGHTER (the collected animated segments from Zack Snyder’s WATCHMEN). That’s weird. IMDb says he’s writing a remake of A BOY AND HIS DOG to be directed by David Lee Miller (All Dogs Go to Heaven Activity Center video game). But DelPurgatorio is not credited as a writer on MARSHMALLOW – that went to Andy Greskoviak (BLACK FRIDAY, the one with Bruce Campbell and Michael Jai White).
(Now on Shudder.)
