Teen slasher flicks are pretty low on my "Must-Watch" list for no other reason than they're not that interesting or surprising. And, while I figured out the deal with the character "Angela" not too far in, I was still shocked by the last scene. "What the fuck?" was said aloud.
It starts out with a gruesome boating accident in which a brother, sister, and father are involved. It's unclear who actually dies, particularly among the children. A man on shore, who is presumed to be a friend of the father whispers in shock and dismay, "Michael." Real soap opera quality acting. Years later, the young teenage Angela is escorted by her cousin to summer camp. She's terribly shy and even mute at first, most likely because of her accident. There's not a lot of heavy plot--campers mysteriously go missing or die, and no one seems to know why. Most alarmingly, the head of the camp doesn't do anything about it. How convenient for the plot of the movie to continue!
Of course, there's crude sexual tension among the counselors and campers, though very little embarrassing nudity. There's actually a lot of heavy sexual topics, it was a little darker than I expected.
Right off the bat, Angela's has a harrowing experience. The pervy cook propositions her in the dry stock room, which is actually more terrifying than anything a movie can dream up, being that it's so real. Luckily, her cousin catches them before anything bad happens, and the chef gets what he deserves--a hot bath in a ridiculously large boiling pot of water. Who pushed him in there? Who knows?!
There's also an odd scene where we flashback to when Angela and her brother are spying on their dad and the friend who whispered "Michael" in the beginning. The two men are snuggling in bed, a heavenly haze of romance hovers. The two children giggle at their father and his lover. Do they laugh because it's actually confusing to them?
Meanwhile, Angela refuses the advances of one of the nicer boys at camp, Paul. It's obvious that she's hiding something, if not something more than her understandable nervousness about teen sexuality. They're all very concerned about their looks and how they attract other boys, especially older ones. In fact, one of them is actually has a thing with the head of the camp, a grumpy old man who nearly beats up Angela's cousin. There's an awful scene where the meanest and supposedly prettiest of the girls is sodomies with a hot curling iron.
SPOILER ALERT YE BEEN WARNED AHHRG
The ending is very blatant. Two of the counselors find Angela with her friend, Paul. She's sweetly humming and stroking his hair as his head sits in her lap. His head is literally sitting in her lap, because she actually chopped it off. Standing up, it's revealed what she was hiding the entire time--Angela is actually a boy. With a bloody hatchet in her hand, she wheezes heavily with a blank stare, seeming possessed. That's what made me say "What the fuck?" because it was actually pretty scary!
The fear here is not of surviving the killer, but clearly of sex. There's so much pressure among these teenagers to be attractive, desired, and experienced, but it's unclear from where the pressure actually comes. The extremes--the deviant chef, the children's failure to understand their father's relationship, the disgusting willingness in which one of the girls insists on being with the grump old camp director, the unfortunate ending of the prettiest girl, all point to the grotesque vision inexperienced and scared people may have of sex.
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