By Joseph Perry and Mike Imboden
Normally here at “The Good, the Bad, and the Verdict”, both Joseph and Mike give their thoughts on a slice of feature length cinema. However, here and there they will be taking a look at films that don’t quite hit the run time for a feature length classification. For this installment, it’s Canadian short Hell is a Teenage Girl by Stephen Sawchuk, Little Psycho Productions, and Sawchuk Productions - courtesy of Fantasia 2024.
Synopsis
The small town of Springboro is terrorized by a masked serial killer targeting high schoolers who break "the rules of horror" - don't drink, don't do drugs, and don't have sex - but one teenage girl refuses to play by his rules...
Reviews
Joseph: What’s a girl to do when she is shunned by her high school classmates because her father is a notorious masked slasher, whose victims are teens getting up to their usual naughtiness on Halloween? In Parker’s (Skylar Radzion) case, it’s doing whatever it takes — drinking, doing drugs, and having sex — to stand up to dad. Writer/director Sawchuk riffs on 1970s and 1980s slasher tropes and 1990s teen ensemble horror elements to deliver a truly fun horror comedy that pays respects to its forebears while adding new twists. The result is a blast. The humor is sharp — a one-off line involving a bidet had me on the floor — the performances top-notch, and the love for and knowledge of the horror genre apparent. No quibbles from me, as the production values, storytelling, cinematography, and pacing are all of a high order. Sawchuk has crafted a short introducing a world that deserves to be fully fleshed out into a feature film.
Mike: As the slasher aficionado of the GBV duo, this homage to the sub-genre was right up my alley. There are nods to what has come before (a kid wearing a familiar colored sweater in the hallway at school) and the main plot device of the film is the trope of no drinking, no drugs, and no sex - something that has spurred on many a slasher over the years. These are dealt with in a fairly humorous way that makes total sense and begs one to question why it hadn’t been tried before.
Being a scant 14 minutes or so, there’s not a lot of time to do much with characterization, although Sawchuk’s directing and Radizon’s acting manage to do a good job in creating a full-formed final girl in “Parker”. There’s also not a lot of room for scares, although the killer does look pretty menacing.
I’d love to see Sawchuk get enough funding to explore this idea as a feature film. As it stands, Hell is a Teenage Girl is a great appetizer for a night of classic slasher films.
Hell is a Teenage Girl
Directed By: Stephen Sawchuk
Written By: Stephen Sawchuk
Starring: Skylar Radzion, Faly Mevamanana, Mar Andersons
Run Time: 15m
Rating: NR
Release Date: 2024
Comments
Post a Comment
Share your thoughts with us