Todd Strauss-Schulson

Max's mother was a struggling actress best-known for her role as one of the murdered camp counselors in the low-budget 1980s slasher movie Camp Bloodbath. Several years after her mother's death in a car accident, Max reluctantly agrees to attend an anniversary screening of the Camp Bloodbath movies.

When she and several of her friends are trapped in the movie theater by a fire, they attempt to escape via an exit behind the movie screen and accidentally end up in the movie itself. If they show more want to stand any chance of making it home, they'll have to figure out how to survive until the end of the movie.

This was better and more hilarious than I expected. Yes, this had some meta "deconstructed slasher movie" aspects, but it was also about the relationship between Max and her mother, Max's grief, and, to a certain extent, Max's relationship with her friends.

As someone who has read quite a lot of "reborn as the villainess in my favorite otome game/web novel" books and manga lately, it was especially fun seeing how aspects of that kind of story were handled here. Everything started off faithful to the original movie but soon changed in ways that made it impossible for the story to play out the way it originally did. In the end, the only iron-clad plot points they were left with were "Billy always shows up when female characters start taking off their clothes" and "only a virgin wielding Billy's own machete can beat him."

There were a bunch of moments that made me laugh. Everyone was very upfront about how stupid the Camp Bloodbath characters were - the most over-the-top ones were Kurt (the oversexed jock) and Tina (the equally oversexed dumb blonde). At one point, Tina got oven mitts put on her hands in order to prevent her from casually stripping off her clothes and calling Billy forth too soon. It just got more ridiculous from there.

There were some touching scenes between Max and the character her mother played. I wasn't expecting that there would be a similarly touching scene involving Max and Vicki (the "mean girl"). I don't know that I entirely believed the way Vicki was presented, but I still liked that scene and appreciated that she wasn't an idiot.

All in all, I really enjoyed this and could see myself rewatching it.

Extras:

Cast and crew commentary, writers' commentary, progression of visual effects, previsualization, director's production notes, and deleted and extended scenes with optional director's commentary. They really struggled with the ending, and I'm not sure the insistence on setting it in Camp Bloodbath's sequel was a good idea. That said, if one of those three versions had to be the ending, I'm glad they went with the one they did.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

I'm not much for rom-coms either, but what the hell, I enjoyed this movie, I came across it by chance on streaming and thought it was a fun takeoff of the romcom genre.