final girl Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Director – Jane Schoenbrun – 2026 – US – Cert. 15 – 106m

A film director given the job of rebooting the Camp Miasma horror franchise finds her life turned upside-down by the reclusive star of the original film – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 21st

Once upon a time, there was a series of slasher movies about Camp Miasma in which Little Death – a possibly male figure wearing an air vent on their head and wielding a long, pointed, metal spear – would appear from the lake and kill people. Such as, for instance, the hapless, dog-walking elderly couple of whom the man is turned into a ludicrously high fountain of blood. 29-year-old Indie filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) has picked up the job of making the latest instalment in the popular horror franchise which she has watched since its inception.

In order to put together a pitch for the series’ producers, she travels to the off the beaten track home of the original film’s final girl Billy (Gillian Anderson). En route, she’s thrilled to pick up a DVD copy of the sixth entry in the franchise from a roadside store where she stops to buy Gummies and other confectionery.… Read the rest

Prometheus

Director – Ridley Scott – 2012 – US – Cert.15 – 124m

*****

UK release date 02/06/2012.

Western social attitudes to women have come a long way since Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) gratuitously stripped down to her underwear prior to fending off the malevolent creature in the finale of Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi shocker Alien (1979), but would appear still to have a long way to go.

You might think the glass ceiling has been abolished with the expedition on spaceship Prometheus being run by ice-cool blonde Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), but subsequent plot twists (which we won’t reveal) suggest otherwise. Scientist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), impossibly pregnant with a mysterious and rapidly growing embryo, is unexpectedly forced to improvise when the automated medical operations facility with which she had hoped to perform her own Caesarian turns out programmed for male surgery only. If sisters are now doing it for themselves, plenty of male-designed hurdles are still making sure they don’t do it it that easily.

Elsewhere, as Prometheus pre-empts the Alien franchise’s “which one of the crew is an android?” gambit by introducing us to the non-human David (Michael Fassbender) walking around the ship before he awakens first Vickers then her subordinate crew members from hyper-sleep, the android male still appears to possess more final authority than anyone else on board.… Read the rest