Dead Teenagers (2024) by Quinn Armstrong

Director: Quinn Armstrong

Year: 2024

Country: USA

Alternate Titles: N/A

Genre: Slasher

Plot:

Heading out into the woods, a group of friends decide to hang out before heading back to school in the fall, but when they discover the remains of a movie script depicting the group being attacked by a serial killer must try to use the pages they have to outwit and survive the situation.

Review:

This was a decent genre effort with a couple of big issues. One of the better features here is the strong and generally enjoyable setup that allows for a fine meta-variation on the genre but also the trilogy as a whole. The cabin location where it all starts is quickly shown to be the location where the other entries in the series were shot with the discovery of the previous filming equipment or scattered script pages that dictate what’s to come in the film currently being played out. Invoking this element with the use of supernatural time-portals, alternate realities, and changing dynamics within the friend group based on how their perceived reactions to everything playing out around them is a bit over-the-top and difficult to make sense of everything but their creativity in doing that comes off well enough overall. With the few kills handled through solid enough practical effects, it’s a good enough time on that front.

Outside of this, though, there’s not much else to this one. The fact that it’s so confusing jumping around and going through different timelines and storyline beats makes everything feel far more confusing than it actually is, with the main problem being the idea of what’s going on here being way too advanced an idea for this type of production to muster. Letting the whole thing run on a meta-slasher idea of the teens finding a script for a film based on their lives and trying to alter it by reading it aloud and acting it out gives this a generally lame feel instead of trying to show that the riends are altering their fate since it’s too cheap to effectively do anything more than just have the same group of people stand around the same locations reading from the script as if that’s supposed to change anything.

That highlights just how dull and confusing this one is with the whole thing jumping around so frequently to different viewpoints and storyline universes that it’s nearly impossible to figure out what’s supposed to be going on or happening. It’s hard to tell if the cast is supposed to be reacting to an escaped killer in the area and that was what the original script was supposed to be before it got intertwined with reality, what anything means once they start taking things way too literally, or why anything should matter at all which is the main detrimental about it all since the characters are suddenly so different from what we were introduced to that it all being character-based scenarios that we’re reacting to which are then changed on the reality of what’s going on so it’s just immensely confusing. These all hold the film down.

Overview: **/5

An enjoyable enough concept but let down by some big factors, this was a pretty serviceable idea that works far better than its execution due to that being the main drawback here. Those who appreciate this kind of storyline or appreciate the other entries in the trilogy while most others out there turned off by these factors should heed caution.