This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Summer Camp
Plot Overview
John & Kathy (Rosebud Baker) are
huddled by the campfire anticipating another season at
their secluded summer Camp Pineway. Kathy goes back to their
cabin for some more beer while John works on his guitar riffs.
While apart they are both simultaneously murdered, which would
have taken two assailants.
The next morning counselors come
trickling in. Finding only an unsigned note from absent John and
Kathy, Jason (Fred Hechinger) the senior counselor (of six years)
sets himself up as temporary leader, sequesters their cell phones, and
goes over the camp rules. They all proceed to enjoy themselves in
small groups, culminating in a community wiener roast.
The masked
assailants split up and start wasting counselors one at a time.
When the others cotton to it, they panic but can't find the cell
phones to call the police on. Three go together to use the one land
line on the place, but the line's been cut. In their haste to
return, Jason gets separated from his two escorts. When he arrives
back alone, the others take him for the culprit and bind him for
torture. Fellow counselor Claire (Abby Quinn) frees him, but where
are they to go? The vehicles have been incapacitated and it's a
thirty mile walk to the nearest town. Looks like this year will be
even worse than the last for Jason.
Ideology
Jason suffers from the Peter Pan syndrome: refusal to grow up. Think along the lines of author Silviano Santiago: not “like one of those … diplomats who are groomed for the post from the moment they start to crawl … people who take on a lifestyle in their adolescence and follow it through to the letter and when they grow up they become what they already were in their youth: old men” (33). From an early age Jason wanted to be a lawyer but he's stuck back there. He lays down the law to the campers, volunteers to contact the police, and endures a lot of abuse customary to that profession, but at age 24 he hasn't taken the steps to get there. He's a seasonal camp counselor (“It's a job,”) but his mom thinks, “$100 a week is hardly employment.”
A good lesson can be had from the apostle Paul: (1Cor. 9:24-25) “Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.” The prize goes to the winner who was “temperate in all things” to succeed. Sure it's fine to take a summer job between high school and college, but the prize doesn't go to the guy who stays there.
Webster defines “temperance n 1: moderation in action, thought, or feeling: RESTRAINT.” The counselors arrived in their own cars, in car pools, one by motorcycle, one in his step-dad's machine, and Jason driven by his mother. The others drove vehicles in moderation, but Jason was retro. As for moderation in thoughts, Jason's mom advised him, “You've got to start thinking about your future.” As for moderation in feeling, Jason let camp life get to him last year, reducing him to tears.
Two counselors in a folie à deux went to the other extreme taking an immoderate shortcut to make their mark on the world. Slaughtering a whole crew of counsellors, they figured, would make them famous. They were sorry to see that Jason would be getting the credit, but they'd get some notoriety for escaping alive. The male for his part says he wouldn't mind going to jail if the credit for the massacre went to him. The female said her partner in crime didn't make her to it, but she was responsible for her own actions.
There's a disturbing trend in modern Bible translations to substitute the term self-control for temperance. Self-control was what the woman exercised to set her own course. Temperance was popularized during Prohibition to speak only of alcohol consumption that we see taking place here too. So as not to confuse modern readers, translators revised their English Bibles to reflect the decline of temperance used in its general sense, rather than the more prolific one now.
Solomon provides a metaphor, (Eccl. 4:13-14) “Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and foolish king, who will no more be admonished. For out of prison he cometh to reign; whereas also he that is born in his kingdom becometh poor.” The wise native words of our King James Version (KJV) have become poor in currency due to reduced usage in ordinary speech. Nevertheless, the wise KJV is still better than the foolish, intractable modern ones that place themselves beyond correction from pew or scholar, “for out of prison he cometh to reign,” that is there's some kind of sordid history behind this “king,” which makes this movie insightful about what went into making our modern English Bibles, from the RSV onwards.
As George
Marsh put it in an 1859 postgraduate lecture on the English
Bible of 1611, (448–9):
the English Bible sustains, and always has sustained to the general English tongue, the position of a treatise upon a special knowledge requiring, like any branch of science, a special nomenclature and phraseology. The language of the law, for example, in both vocabulary and structure, differs widely from that of unprofessional life; the language of medicine, of metaphysics, of astronomy, of chemistry, of mechanical art, all these have their appropriate idioms, very diverse from the speech which is the common heritage of all. Why, then, should theology, the highest of knowledges, alone be required to file her tongue to the vulgar utterance, when every other human interest has its own appropriate expression, which no man thinks of conforming to a standard that, because it is too common, can hardly be other than unclean?
Just as time served in prison would degrade the man's speech to make it repulsive to regular talkers, so people steeped in the early KJV language find holy scripture rendered in day-to-day speech abhorrent. That some of its words have become poor in usage over time can be remedied by a mere vocabulary upgrade.
Production Values
“” (2023) was written and directed by Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard. It stars Fred Hechinger, Abby Quinn, and D'Pharaoh Woon-a-Tai. Hechinger finds the sweet spot playing Jason a character befuddled by life. The two psychos were given real acting parts in soliloquies exposing their characters' neuroses. The others just had to have fun or act scared.
MPA rated it R for horror violence, language throughout, and some sexual references. The blood scenes were not overly gruesome. Runtime ≈ 1½ hours.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
This is a Peter Pan play with a capital hookup as Captain Hook. Instead of Wendy there's a Ouija board. And a camp named for an evergreen represents Never Never Land. It's not a religious camp, and the counselors are inexperienced. Lots of trouble ensues and it's reasonably scary. The mother here seemed reasonable.
I'd call this one slasher-lite. It should suit some tastes.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Decent action scenes. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Average special effects. Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day. Suspense: Don't watch this movie alone. Overall movie rating: Three stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture quotations were from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software, Print.
Marsh, George P. “Formation
of our English sacred dialect.”
Lectures on the English
Language. London: John Murray, 1863. Print.
——available to
read or download at www.bibles.n7nz.org.
Santiano, Silviano. Stella Manhattan. Translated by George Yúdice. © 1994 Duke University Press. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994. Print.
Webster's Ninth New College Dictionary. Springfield, Massachusetts, Merriam-Webster, 1983. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org