“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is “a title so good you feel the film to which it’s attached should really have to earn it”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph, and “happily it does”.
Starring Gillian Anderson as “fading horror queen”, it is both “extravagantly funny” and “recklessly bizarre”. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, an “earnest yet self-loathing” director who has been asked by a Hollywood studio to reboot “Camp Miasma”, a fictional 1980s US slasher franchise.
The original is now regarded as “embarrassingly non-PC”, chiefly because its villain, Little Death, is the spirit of a gender-nonconforming child killed by other campers. As a celebrated, self-styled “queer filmmaker”, Kris is just the person to make the rebooted film: she’s a horror nerd who has been obsessed with the original since childhood, particularly with Squeak, its “final girl” (the last female character left alive). She tracks down Billy Presley (Anderson), who played Squeak and now lives, in creepy “Norma Desmond-esque” seclusion, at the former summer camp where the original was filmed.
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As Kris tries to convince Billy to appear in the reboot, the pair form a bond, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. And as their relationship deepens, fiction and reality begin to blur, and the film turns into something both “sexy” and “slaughterous”.
“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” “won’t be to everyone’s taste”, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in the Daily Mail – the title gives a fairly good sense of whether it’s for you or not. “It gets messy. It gets pretentious.” And it’s not particularly scary (the violence is “almost cartoon-like”). But it is beautifully shot, funny and “marvellously camp – in both senses of the word”. “Either way, Anderson is terrific.”
