This 80’s slasher is most famous for its twist ending, but it’s also a deeply weird and often very effective slasher movie.

The film opens with Angela and Peter on a boating trip with their dad that ends in tragedy. Years later Angela is living with her crazy aunt, and she along with her cousin is sent to a summer camp. Once there, campers and staff are slowly picked off one by one by an unseen killer.

No spoilers for this section. The movie stands apart from other slashers in a few key ways. One, the kills are not the standard murders we see in other movies of its ilk. There is no knife wielding psycho or machete waving monster. These kills rely on the environments are often look more like accidents.

The cook is a disgusting, sex pest who tries to corner a camper in the freezer. He is later thrown off balance by the killer and boiled alive by a massive pot of water. He lies on the floor screaming in agony covered in pulsating blisters and pustules. It’s horrifying and horrible and gnarly. The effects work is great. The makeup is A+. It’s also a far cry from Jason hacking and slashing his way through sexy campers.

Another way it stands aside from other slashers is that each victim is a terrible person. We don’t feel bad about the cook. Angela’s bully gets brutally murdered with a hot electric curling iron in one of the most shocking scenes. Which is disturbing, but I did not shed a tear for her. The moral justification for the killings in this movie set it way apart from the have sex and die tropes of the genre.

The other way it sets itself apart from the slashers is that it invests a lot of time and attention into the lives and preteen dramas of the campers. A chunk of the movies brief runtime is devoted to the young boys beating the older boys at a game of baseball. This scene would never exist in a Friday the 13th movie. It’s wholesome and pays attention to the hopes and desires of its characters.

These differences are all fun, but the movie is still kind of a mess. It’s follows Angela ostensibly. However she rarely speaks, and the movie keeps drifting away from her to follow her cousin or her bullies or the boy who likes her. The narrative is hazy and unfocused, so while I like the baseball game it also feels like a random tangent that doesn’t really serve a strong narrative purpose.

This movie has wildly inconsistent performances. Everyone seems to be in a different movie. The aunt is the biggest example of this. She is played by Desiree Gould as an old Hollywood grand dame. She is from a John Waters movie. The camp owner played by Mike Kellin is doing a gruff cheapskate that feels more at home in a crime drama. Then there’s Angela herself, played by Felissa Rose. She is mostly mute in this movie awkward staring at the world around her. She is a very strange screen presence and never really seems to click into rhythm as the character.

The final complaint I have is that the film has one big twist at the end and you can tell while watching it that the whole film exists simply to serve that twist. The whole film is building up to that final moment. It’s kind of like a magician who promises a big trick and then teases you about the big trick for an hour and a half then ends the show as soon as the trick is finished. There is no falling action. There’s no development. The movie only exists to shock people in the final 30 seconds.

Okay spoilers…

The big twist is that Angela was killed in the boating accident in the beginning of the movie. Her brother Peter survived and was sent to live with the crazy aunt. She forced Peter to be Angela and raised him as a girl his whole life. This is the reason “Angela” kills everyone. But it doesn’t really explain anything. It’s just an exploitative shock to give the audience a moment of “woah, I didn’t see that coming.” It’s clearly going for a Norman Bates in Psycho type of twist, but in that the twist makes sense and serves to deepen the psychology of the characters and the situation. In this movie it just feels cheap.

I’ve read a lot of takes on the film from different experts on gender and the politics or gender. I am not qualified to comment on that. All I can say is that watching the movie the twist felt cheap. It felt like the whole movie was building to a big reveal and then after that reveal the movie had nothing else to say and cut to credits as quickly as possible. In terms of shock for shocks sake, it’s well done. In terms of storytelling it’s a miss.

It’s half a cup of tea for me. A lot of it really worked. I just wish there was more to this movie.

B+ Half a cup of tea.