I ended up going to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma during its second week. (Or, if I were to run the title unnecessarily through a thesaurus, as I do, Post-Adolescent Copulation and Demise at Bivouac Pestilential Effluvium.) The only showing available was after dark, which is probably appropriate for this type of movie. That, of course, led to some shenanigans getting home, but that’s not part of this review.
The movie starts with a writer-director, played by Hannah Einbinder, talking with her agent about an upcoming meeting with Billy, played by Gillian Anderson. Billy was the star of the very first Camp Miasma movie, but she never committed to any of the sequels. She did a few small acting roles in other movies afterward, but then basically retired to Camp Tivoli, the original camp where Camp Miasma was filmed. She has become something of a recluse, but she’s not the “get off my lawn” type of recluse. She welcomes people who come to visit her; she just doesn’t want anyone trying to drag her away from the life she has chosen.
Meanwhile, the Camp Miasma movies continued without her. The first one was great. The second one was great. Then they started going downhill. Different writers came in, different people became involved in the production, there were delays, production problems and studio notes, and somehow they eventually ended up with something like 15 movies. They went everywhere: space, a ship, underground, all sorts of increasingly crazy variations. It’s basically an analog of the Friday the 13th franchise, particularly the increasingly ridiculous Jason sequels, where eventually the franchise itself became more important than whatever sensible reason there might be to make another movie.
The two leads also bring very different kinds of acting to the movie. Gillian Anderson is old school, and she is terrific. She’s the kind of actor who can disappear into a role until the character becomes more important than the actress playing her. Billy is a Southern belle, a faded glory, and I completely buy her as that person. Hannah Einbinder is a different type of performer. She brings much more of her own established persona into the character. Rather than disappearing into the writer-director, she feels like exactly the sort of person you would cast because her particular personality fits this particular role. And it does. She is absolutely the right person for this character.
At one point, though, another movie temporarily jumped into my head: Scream. Scream did a wonderful job of defining the rules of the traditional slasher movie while simultaneously making fun of them. You can’t be the single woman alone at home. You can’t have sex. You can’t be the quirky couple. These people are going to die. There is a scene in Camp Miasma showing Billy as a young woman, played by Amanda Fix, and she is about to have sex for the first time. Immediately, Scream started shouting inside my head: Oh, you’re going to die.
Except, of course, I already knew she wasn’t going to die. I had already met Billy decades later, played by Gillian Anderson. So Scream jumped back out of my head, and I kept watching. That may have affected how strongly some of what Camp Miasma was doing worked for me. Horror movies have been examining, violating and making fun of their own rules for a long time now. Simply turning one of those rules upside down doesn’t automatically surprise me anymore.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is very much another attempt to take horror from a different perspective and turn the genre on its head by introducing a new reality. At first, I didn’t really understand what it was doing. As the movie went along, though, it taught me how to watch it. Once I understood the rules it was operating under, I got it. I just didn’t particularly appreciate it.
I won’t give away the conceit of the movie because not everything deserves to be spoiled, even a week after release. I will say that the movie has a very particular twist on what reality is, and I think they carry it off. That’s important. My problem isn’t that the idea doesn’t work or that the movie cheats in order to make it work. Once you understand what it’s doing, it follows through. I just didn’t care for the idea very much. I didn’t walk out of the theater thinking, “Well, that was an interesting conceit.” Instead, my reaction was basically, “Okay. They carried it off. Next.”
But I did enjoy the movie. It didn’t give me any form of nightmare, and I don’t have any particular need to discuss it endlessly afterward. It was entertaining, Gillian Anderson was terrific, the idea worked on its own terms, and I had a good time watching it. Sometimes that’s enough.
★★★½☆ — 3½ out of 5 stars
- Jane Schoenbrun — Writer/Director
- Gillian Anderson — Billy
- Amanda Fix — Young Billy
- Hannah Einbinder — Kris, the writer-director