<PERSON>
A singular work that bares closest resemblance to The Slumber Party Massacre in that it's genre satire played deadly serious. It dissects and disembowels horror's puritanical obsessions with virginity and sexual pleasure, revealing all of it's good guys to be dark figures of patriarchal violence and rape culture. But even when it presents it's parody in absurd scenarios, like the teenage fuck fest, it still balances the ironic distances of end-of-the-millennium American youth cultures with an earnest and sobering depiction of sexist hypocrisy. I'm not sure yet what to make of the killer's cross-dressing/transgender reveal. While it was telegraphed a mile away, it didn't feel as perverse and cynical as I would have suspected, but it still situates gender bending as a degenerate symptom of masculine violence, which is bad. 823
The textures and rhythms of the film are top notch, which makes it surprising that this wasn't better known at the time of it's release. I started high school in 2000 and saw most horror films of that period in the theater, but I didn't even know this existed until some folks on Twitter included it in their lists. Really stands alone compared to the <PERSON> wannabees of the time. It's far more substantive and live-in than the waves of sleek shit that Scream inaugurated. Excellent casting too 147