I’m starting to think that maybe I don’t even need to really stack up a list of movies at the start of each Halloween season anymore. Not that I haven’t used it at all or that it’s not been helpful because it has. At the start of this I did rely relatively heavily on it just to have a heads up so I don’t have to spend a tremendous amount of time scouring streaming services for different movies. There’s a big part of this endeavor that is very organic in nature. I can’t really map out what I’m going to watch necessarily because I go a lot more by feel. I tend to rebel against things I have to do in recreational settings. Like when everybody was going nuts over Stranger Things, I didn’t watch it just because everyone told me I had to. And it wasn’t like a strict kind of Clockwork Orange type of deal or anything. I just rebelled against societal pressure to do something extracurricular that I didn’t feel like doing. I’m pretty sure if people hadn’t really said anything, I’d have probably just watched it on my own and that would have been fine. But in the last week or more, I’ve really just sort of let the mood dictate what I’m watching. It’s not that it always works, by any means. I’ve watched plenty of nonsense movies I wish I hadn’t.
Really and truly, in the 25 days I’ve been doing this, today is really the 5th time I’ve found something I actually kind of liked unexpectedly. Up until now I was 2-2 on my movies. M3GAN 2.0 and Heretic were on my list and they were both good. The Taking of Deborah Logan and Vicious were not. Today’s movie came to me via a TikTok creator who is big in the MovieTok realm. He does his own 31 days of horror on that platform and today’s movie for him was this one, “Marshmallow”. I hadn’t heard of it before and thanks to him it became my watch for today. I will say I don’t just follow his recommendations blindly. Most of the time he really does know what he’s talking about, but with a collection of between 8-9K movies, he’s a true collector whereas I’m more of a curator at this point. I know I’ll never get to that size of collection mostly because I don’t want to and don’t think there’s that many movies I need to own. For instance, he owns the entire Sleepaway Camp series on blu ray. I won’t ever need that on my shelf even if I had a warehouse to hold them all and space was of no concern. But I do trust him most of the time and this felt like a low enough risk to take so I went for it.
It’s another low budget film but I should clarify that the low for this one is $3M. So the production value is definitely high. There’s a few notable faces in the cast. Corben Bernsen is probably the easiest to recognize and his role is minimal. One of the guys from Super Troopers is in this and the girl from season 2 of Netflix’s “The Punisher” was in it as well. I wish I was dedicated enough to go look up their names and give them credit but that’s not really how this works. I’m not a trained reviewer who is crafting a serious critique of the film. I’m a dude, sitting on his recliner, writing about horror movies for our movie website. This is the most dedicated to a blog I’ve ever been. And last year I only made it to day 29. I like doing this but it’s all stream of consciousness really. I don’t even look this over to ensure for grammatical correctness. If you’ve read any of these, sometimes I’m weak on paragraph breaks and heavy on tangents. It’s in my brain and then it’s on the page. If we were sitting here together in real life, these would be the words coming out of my facehole for this conversation. I’m just putting them on a screen because it’s kind of fun for me to document it like this. When I’m done, I’ll hit publish without even reading it over again. If this was a paying gig and I had to really turn this in, I’d do a lot more work on it. And it’s not that you, my implied fictitious reader, aren’t important enough for me to do a good job with it. I’m naturally trying on my first go around for this to be as good as it can be. But you’re also not real. Well, if you are actually reading this you are. I’m not trying to give you an existential crisis. I just genuinely believe no one out there is actually reading this. I don’t even know if this qualifies as breaking the fourth wall or not. I think so but at the same time maybe not. I don’t know. But lets get back to this movie already.
I did like this movie quite a bit. It droops a little in the middle, or maybe I just had too many things I was preoccupied with and should have strictly paid more attention to the movie but I don’t know that was the case. But I liked this film. I will say that I’ve liked other movies I’ve watched during this month better than this one, but it still gets high marks from me for a number of things.
First I have to give them credibility with the production value. Again, it’s $3M so it wasn’t a guerilla film crew in the wilderness shooting on iPhones but in 2025, that budget will still go fast on an indie film for sure. So expectations were reasonably set and they still did a good job. The visual aspects of the film were presented well. We deal with a lot of dream sequences and fantastic things happening in them and the effects were shot really nicely to where nothing felt cheap. That, to me, is a big deal on an film like that. When you don’t have the money to dress a lot of things up, doing something extraordinary in a dream state takes ingenuity and with practical effects it looks really nice. They accomplished this well a number of times in the film. Additionally, the cinematography felt inviting. There are a lot of emotional tones and a number of physical spaces that are occupied throughout the film. The way these were shot with all the elements in play was done expertly. There are a lot of night shots and it’s at a camp. Having just watched a film like Sleepaway Camp, this movie had a completely different aesthetic. I know we’re talking a 40 year difference in time and technology so I’ll do my best to take that into consideration. But at the same time, the feel of a scene doesn’t have to come from a fancy camera or a cheap camera. This movie felt more authentic and real where Sleepaway was just awkward and immature. It’s the same age range. It’s the same setting. The definition of preteen drama may have evolved in some forms and fashions over the decades but the heart of the plight of adolescence has not changed so significantly that it will hit on a completely different emotional level. Insecurity, maturation, bullies, and the like are still much the same in 2025 as they were in the 80’s. Sure things look a little different but when you break them down, things are also still not as stark a contrast as we might think.
That leads me into the acting for sure. These kids were not spectacular. It was not a cast full of Haley Joel Osments and Makenna Graces lighting up the screen. That being said, these kids were far more believable as kids than in many camp movies. It’s a little different than the teenage landscape so there are definitely some differences in that respect. But kids still have their crushes and their antagonists. They have to overcome homesickness and the awkwardness of making new friends. Morgan, our main character, is a timid little kid who is brave enough to walk across the street and try and make friends, but it still is hard to keep putting yourself out there and being met with rejection and bullying. Thankfully he does fall in with a crowd of boys that he can call friends. And they are all very sincere in their representation of this generation. It felt very natural and this lends a lot of credibility to the overall film. When the world seems complete and well crafted, it’s easy to believe the threat to it is real. When it’s poorly created and unrealistic in one aspect or another, it’s like you’re looking at a picture of something you know is fake. It doesn’t invite you in and being on the outside means you’re not privy to the emotional tone of the film and any threats that are present to the protagonists we are supposed to follow. So I have to give kudos to to the younger cast of this film in really doing a fantastic job playing kids. I know that sounds odd, but when you’ve watched enough kids pretend to be kids really poorly, it ends up being a weird but true phenomenon.
The last major thing about this movie that I want to applaud is the story. While seeing the full thing come together in the end lets me know that it’s not a completely new venture, I like this spin on it. It’s nearly impossible to construct something that literally no one has ever done before. So I don’t really expect that. What I do want is the notion that if you are going to reiterate a story or an idea that’s already been told before, you do it in a way that is entertaining and sincere. That’s really all it comes down to. When you break down many of the origin movies in the first couple of phases of the MCU, they are almost all the same basic structure. What works is they are good stories with compelling characters that are retold by gifted storytellers. They have the bones of a story and they bring it to life in their own particular way. That’s really what it comes down to. If you can surprise your audience with something they’ve truly seen dozens of times in their life, that’s a wonderful gift to give them. To breathe new life into something they are already familiar with is the best. Maybe its the performance of the cast putting a new spin on a classic. Perhaps it’s integrating a different timeline so that a twist presents itself more naturally and unexpectedly. Whatever the means are, to take subject matter and repackage it with your own flair is a fantastic thing and this movie, to me, hits that note. What’s nice about this film is it uses familiarity initially to bring you into the story. It’s relatable in a way that certainly fits a pretty cookie cutter kind of mold at the beginning but when we begin to deviate in interesting ways and the visual cues are done in the fashion they are in this movie, you don’t realize it but you’re invested int he world of Camp Almaa more heavily than you ever intended to. And I will say that the payoff in the third act makes everything worthwhile for me. It came together well and made the whole thing cohesively functional in a way I’m not used to seeing in October.
If I had to list one bad thing, and this movie is definitely far from perfect, it’s the tropey nonsense that always gets under my skin. I might be speaking out of both sides of my mouth on this one so I do apologize if I’m being a little wishy washy. But there are two big things with the acting that I really did not like and I feel like I need to address them just because. In the opening of the movie we meet Morgan. He is a middle schoolish aged boy who has just moved. He lives with his parents and his grandfather played by Bernsen. Very early on in the movie he dies. I’m not giving anything away so don’t shoot the messenger. This is in the first 10 minutes of the movie. After dinner he gets up and while Morgan is talking to his mother at the table, Bernsen makes a confused sort of shake of the head as he grips his chest and eventually falls over. They hit us with extreme slow motion and nobody knows how to do anything but react in shock. I knew he was going to die. It was clearly the direction of the scene. And he can die, that’s fine. I’m not lamenting his premature exit from the film. What drives me nuts is the idea that nobody knows what to do in that situation. Mom dials the phone and dad shouts at her like that was the wrong thing to do for some reason. Mom is really just giving them their address while no one attempts to really do anything to remedy the situation. I’m not saying I’d jump in like a paramedic but in that scenario I feel like I can’t just do nothing. If anything, I’m getting some towels and attempting to administer some measure of care. Almost as soon as this scene ends we cut to Morgan heading off to camp, something that was mentioned as an upcoming ordeal at dinner. The casual nature by which we switch scenes here is annoying. I’m not saying we need a full fledged measure of appropriate grieving time, but the contrast in emotional dexterity here is tested significantly. And it bugs me.
The other things that I didn’t like, and I’ll be as succinct as I can be here, were the camp counselors. I didn’t go to a lot of camps as a kid. But I did go to one or two. And I’ve worked at camps before. Granted, they were church camps but they were for the same age range typically. And the counselors were mostly kids in their later teen years and early 20’s. Maybe it’s just because they were church camps mostly, but the behavior of the camp counselors in these movies seems so inflated in so many ways. Not that teens and 20-somethings aren’t horny or high a lot of the time. It’s just always so weird to me that people running camps are so desperate for help that they’ll literally hire the worst of the worst when it comes to these roles. Especially with the guy running this camp. He wasn’t just a sleezeball or a cheapskate. He seemed serious about the camp he was running and so it was a little obnoxious that there was the overtly amorous couple and the stoner in the cast of like 5 counselors. There were literally two that were remotely responsible and this just irks me. Not a huge deal, but it’s just one of those little things that gets under my skin. I wish you could get a camp movie with a full staff of legitimately qualified counselors. Like Lars from Heavyweights. “I’m Feeling Skinny, Tony!” Now THAT’s a camp counselor. (Insert smiley face emoji here)
So where does this movie fall for me. I feel like I’m going to go 6.8 on it. I don’t feel like I can legitimately go all the way into the 7’s on this one. I did like it and if it were available on physical media, I think I’d be picking it up. But while it did a lot of things right, there are some of those detractors that just eat away enough to dock it down to 6.8. I will say that in the grand scheme of a lot of things, this is quite high. I don’t think you truly come across movies that are in the 9’s or even close to an actual full on 10 hardly ever. 8’s are typically high praise from me. So to be just a little less than a 7 is still saying something significant. Many a time I will put a blind buy to the IMDb test of is it over a 6. If a movie I’m interested in a blind buy purchase on has really reeled me in and I cant find it streaming, that can be the make or break. If I find a movie I’ve never seen and the trailer looks really good and I’ve seen people speak highly of it and it’s price point is more than reasonable, many a time has the IMDb rating been the deciding factor. I’ll go and look it up and if it’s over a 6, I’ve pushed purchase on more than a few movies that way and I’ve been rarely let down. So if this one showed up at a 6.8, it would more than likely be an Amazon purchase fairly easily. So if you’re looking for something familiar but with a twist and a turn you might not totally see coming, I’d say give this one a look. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. And now that we’re caught all the way back up, we’ll just wait for tomorrow to get here and start fresh one more time. Until then, I’ll catch you on the flip side.
