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Posts Tagged ‘Jasmin Savoy Brown’

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Thursday, August 27th, 2026

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA is the third movie from writer/director Jane Schoenbrun. I haven’t seen WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR (2021), but I did see I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024), which was released by A24 to great acclaim and adulation.

I confess I didn’t get that one. Didn’t even feel qualified to review it. I love its look, and I was impressed by its creation of a ‘90s tv show called The Pink Opaque that its characters are obsessed with. It’s like the show Videodrome would make in response to the popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But I struggled with watching Justice Smith, who was so charismatic on The Get Down, play such a charmless, passive lead. I’ve read that’s because it’s a trans allegory and the character is repressed, and that’s another thing: there is no way on earth that I would know this was a trans allegory without reading about it. It’s interesting to read about, and it’s a movie that means so much to so many (including plenty of cis people I know), but I simply can’t decode it. I can appreciate the vibes, but in that case it wasn’t enough.

CAMP MIASMA is another trans allegory, but it’s more on my frequency. Maybe some of the very specialized things it’s about are also more universal, or maybe it’s just that it’s funnier. But it sure doesn’t hurt that it’s about slasher movies. Up and coming young indie director Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder, Hacks) has been hired to reboot a long-running, now moribund summer camp slasher series called CAMP MIASMA. The opening credits have a very detailed montage of franchise history, with 14 movies that mostly line up with the FRIDAY THE 13TH sequels, except there’s a Christmas one and an ARMY OF DARKNESS one and I think a HALLOWEEN 6 thorn cult reference. The most important inspiration, though, is SLEEPAWAY CAMP, with the killer’s psychosis attributed to being raised as both a boy and a girl. Kris says they hired her, a known lesbian, in a cynical attempt to launder the problematicness out of the i.p. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 18 Comments »

Scream VI

Wednesday, March 15th, 2023

Nobody else seems to see it this way, but I still think SCREAM was the perfect name for the sequel to SCREAM (1996) that came out in 2022. It revived the seemingly concluded series after 11 years, and for the first time without Wes Craven, so naturally it took today’s legacy sequels – where a set of new, younger characters teams up with returning characters from the old series in a story loosely structured like the first film – as its format and subject. The movies it’s based on never have a number in their title; it only made sense to follow the naming convention of such modern horror franchise entries as HALLOWEEN (2018), HELLBOY (2019), THE GRUDGE (2020), CANDYMAN (2021), WRONG TURN (2021), TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2022), HELLRAISER (2022) and the upcoming THE EXORCIST (2023).

A year later here we are with another one from the same directors (Tyler Gillett & Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, READY OR NOT) and writers (Guy Busick [READY OR NOT] & James Vanderbilt [ZODIAC]) and this time it does have a number in the title – the historic first Roman numeral of the series. SCREAM VI is a good title mainly because the trailer showed the M in SCREAM get slashed and split into a bleeding VI, and secondarily because it’s admitting that yeah, we can’t lie, this is the sixth movie in the SCREAM series. It stars mostly our new set of characters introduced in the last one, but makes reference to characters and events from all five previous SCREAMs. I gotta admit, I’ve been there since the beginning, I’ve watched SCREAM many times, SCREAM 2 several times, SCREAM 3 maybe three times, the other two one each, but they drop so many names so fast I had trouble remembering what they were talking about. Not that it matters.

(Note: There were two guys behind me and one of them had apparently never seen any SCREAM movie before so the other guy tried to explain who each character was as they appeared. Not ideal.) (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Horror | 43 Comments »

Scream (2022)

Monday, January 17th, 2022

We interrupt this Sam Raimi series so I can have a semi-timely review of the new SCREAM movie.


I have some bad news. SCREAM – a teen horror movie that came out when I was older than a teen but I enjoyed it along with the younger people anyway – is 25 fucking years old! And you remember how it was a trilogy and we assumed that was it, but a little while back kind of out of the blue they made a way late part 4? Well, I’m sorry to say that even that happened eleven god damn years ago. How is that possible? It’s not. But it happened. We are old, my friends. Very, very old.

But some of us still like SCREAM and the i.p. gods or whoever decided that the time has come for another one in another era. Many things have changed since the last one. Obviously horror has changed, as it always does. But more importantly the director of the original four, Wes Craven, has passed away, and (in better news) the Weinstein Company has died and gone to Hell, so this is the first time the series has been continued by a new set of people. The rights were picked up by Spyglass Media Group, James Vanderbilt (THE RUNDOWN, ZODIAC) & Guy Busick (READY OR NOT, Castle Rock) wrote the script, and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett (the team behind READY OR NOT) directed it, in the Craven spirit but not trying to be a throwback or anything. (There’s even a joke about overlit ‘90s movies.) Original writer Kevin Williamson did give his blessing and sign on as executive producer, and has given many interviews (such as on Mick Garris’ podcast Post-Mortem) verifying that he really was involved and is excited about the movie. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Horror, Reviews | 34 Comments »

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