#TheySlashThem on #Peacock is beautifully shot and has potential, but ultimately falls flat, so I cannot recommend it. Besides the tame opening prologue kill, it takes 50 minutes before another kill happens. Megan and I said to each other while watching it, "Wait, is this actually a horror film or are we being punked?"
One can make an argument about the psychological horror that the kids endure, and yes, that's there, but the film was marketed differently, or they purposefully did a fake-out...It's supposedly a slasher film about teens at a conversion camp, but the mystery is who is the slasher and who is being targeted? The young actors are mostly all very charming and believable (I wish I could see them all in a different movie), and #KevinBacon is great, as always, but the movie is overall not that scary, and for a #Blumhouse movie, our expectations watching it left us wanting more. Its ultimate sin is that THE KILLS AREN'T GOOD! The Slasher Villain should have been more brutal and the duplicitous counselors should have been even more sinister (they are creepy but watered down, and there are disturbing and upsetting scenes, but they don't go the distance).
This film obviously has a message about young folks dealing with their identities and societal & family pressures of some people wanting them to change, but perhaps this message would have been better suited for a comedy or dramedy or musical (there is a musical scene in the movie) because the filmmakers did not make this work within the slasher genre. It could have worked perhaps under the leadership of directors like Jordan Peele or Mike Flanagan. The 3rd act fizzles, and reveals were almost clever (we guessed them), but They/Them didn't stick the landing in the end.
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