Fairy Tale Friday -Snow White: A Deadly Summer (Maureen McCormick, 2012)

Hello and welcome to Fairy Tale Friday. Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then I’ll begin.

This week because Halloween was Saturday, we decided to watch a horror film version of our classic fairy tale entitled Snow White: A Deadly Summer. I will be honest, this should really be titled Snow White: A Deadly Dullness, but we got a few (unintentional) laughs out of it.

It does bear some resemblance to our fairy tale. There is a young girl named Snow (a nickname she acquired because of a snowflake blankie she had as a baby), a clueless father, a stepmother who wants the father all to herself who talks to both her bathroom mirror and a small compact mirror so she can be evil away from home, seven “friends” and some woods.

Basically the plot is this: Teenage Snow (played by Shanley Caswell) is an unconvincing tearaway whose is doted on by her father Eric Roberts who you might remember as the Master in the Paul McGann’s eighth incarnation of the Doctor in Doctor Who. Perhaps he regrets overacting in that and has decided to underact here to make up for that performance. Here, he appears to be played by a sleeping plank of wood phoning in his performance from a payphone from the 1980s. The stepmother Eve (geddit…like Eve with the apple)  is played by none other than Marcia Brady herself Maureen McCormick. She convinces her husband to send Snow away to a boot camp for delinquent kids that she seems to suspiciously know way too much about. Snow and the seven other campers are picked off one by one by a stranger (or is it??) in a hoodie in the woods and then ends with the most unbelievably trite “I cannot believe they went there” ending.

It is meant to be a horror film, but it is remarkably bloodless. It is full of continuity errors as well as cheap effects and costumes.  Supposedly it had a $1,000,000 budget which makes me wonder what they heck they spent the money on. All of the night scenes that happen in the woods for several days in a row show the same shot of a full moon partially covered by a rabbit shaped cloud and then all the all the actual night scenes with dialogue were filmed in the daytime with an unconvincing blue filter. If I were not teetotal, seeing that same full moon for several nights on the trot would have made an excellent drinking game.

It is a modern story, so no need for period costumes. No need for any costumes really. All the delinquent kids look like they were told “wear some jeans and a black t-shirt” because everyone looks like they dressed themselves. For the killer, just put on a hoodie.

It was directed by David DeCoteau who directed such classics as Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama and my personal favourite 90210 Shark. Need I say more?

There wasn’t a cohesive summary so I have combined details from 2 reviews (COMINGSOON.NET and TAILSLATE.NET) which I will insert comments into. 

This Snow White is a rich girl named Snow Hoffman who is acting out because she doesn’t like her father’s  new wife, Eve. Apparently, she is a delinquent who is out of control. The audience only sees her as an unknowing accomplice to a stolen joyride with her boyfriend where she shouts “Woooo!” a lot. Eve wants Snow out of the picture, so after the troubled teen is party to grand theft auto, Snow’s father agrees with Eve’s suggestion of a 4-week discipline camp. She suggests this not because she cares anything for the girl’s well-being, but because her paranoia – represented, how else, by talking to herself in the mirror – has taken control and she needs to eliminate the threat. Note: I’m assuming Hoffman is her surname, since a sign reading it hangs up in her home—but Hoffman was also the surname used in the Sigourney Weaver version. Also, their house is just that sort of “we have so much money we have lots of white furniture we don’t clean, we just replace when it gets dirty” sort of look about it, including the most bizarre sculpture of a piece of driftwood wearing red high-heeled shoes. We see Eve giving herself a pep talk in the bathroom mirror (I mean we’ve all done that, right?) but her reflection talks back and tells her that she will never be truly loved unless Snow is out of the way. Every time she talked to herself we shouted “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” which also would have made an excellent drinking game. Maureen McCormick tries here—she does have a go at doing “crazy eyes” but I really miss the confidence and spunk she had as Marcia Brady.

Dragged off in the middle of the night, Snow then finds herself at Camp Allegiance along with seven other campers (Snow White and the Seven Delinquents). In charge is ex-Navy SEAL Colonel Hunter who takes great pleasure in whipping spoiled, selfish teens into shape to turn them into well-behaved and productive members of society. His plan for this is by having them do tons of push-ups and jumping jacks and some light manual labour. Unfortunately they will also be killed one-by-one. Note: Yes, this boot camp sends thugs to drag your wayward child away in the night while you sit on the white sofa and drink chardonnay and try to look like you are vaguely upset that your only daughter is being roughly manhandled, but instead look like you were thinking about what might be on television tonight. These are also the least impressive group of bad kids I have ever seen. They remind me of those Trixie Belden girl detective books where Trixie puts on mascara and eyebrow pencil as a disguise and no one recognises her because she looks like a “bad girl.” It is like what Jack Webb from Dragnet thought hippies were like. They are the least convincing, most bland white-bread “have you ever even MET a teenager???” group of kids I have ever seen.  They all are supposed to be bad-ass with excessive drinking and drug taking and car jacking and thieving, but they all look like they’d be too afraid to do any of those things. It reminds of this boy I knew at summer camp who, in an effort to try to be cool, endlessly whittered on about “having  a nic fit” (as if he were suffering from withdrawals from nicotine) which was just sad and laughable. There is one girl in the film who has a flask of brandy she stole from her mother to show she is heavy drinker from which she occasionally takes a tiny swig. She has some sort of twitchy heroin withdrawal for half a minute as well. We have been watching episodes of Law and Order from the mid  90s on DVD and let me tell ya—those kids know how to look tough and street smart. That TV show puts this film to shame.

But someone else is cutting in, killing the campers one by one (or two at a time when the chance presents itself). For some reason, Snow has dreams that predict these deaths. Not that this extraneous ability helps anyone all that much, other than providing a convenient excuse for badly shot murder scenes. The kills are just as poorly handled. They all happen in broad daylight. They’re all bloodless. The staging suggests a director who has never been behind a camera before. Note: This director has been behind a camera before but judging by the type of film he normally makes (soft porn to cheap schlock horror) staging doesn’t seem to matter. The slutty girl (There always is one. Here she looks like a bargain version of Mean Girl Regina George) gets strangled by her own gold chain, but the body has no markings or bruising on the neck. The smart one who is only pretending to be a wayward teen and is secretly an undercover reporter gets it in the shower and then appears as if someone wiped a french fry with ketchup on her face. On and on it goes. The schoolgirl detective one tells us that at this very same camp 30 years ago in 1987 a terrible murder happened, and the murderer escaped and was never seen again. Cue ominous music. There is also a scene where our protagonist is rescued by a wild woman with snaggly teeth who has been living in the woods in a little hut in easy walking distance from the main camp that the police have failed to notice for the last 30 years. She was there at the camp and a mean girl named Eve (Shock! Horror! The same as her stepmother!) murdered her boyfriend because he looked at another girl and then blamed her, so she ran off to live reasonably nearby as a wild woman. So now we know that the Hoodie Murderer is her STEPMOTHER! Gasp!!! We have the only scene actually shot at night where the stepmother gets a pep talk from her compact mirror and then lowers her hood and tries to kill Snow while her new delinquent boyfriend and the wild woman (who now has perfect teeth) fight her off and throw her over a cliff.

And then we have the ending. The terrible ending. The terrible-horrible-no-good-very bad ending. The ending that must be the first thing you are taught at film school not to use—it was all a dream. Because it turns out that  everything Snow had experienced had been a nightmare caused by a drug overdose. Regarding Eve, her father reveals to Snow that Eve committed suicide after being told that he wouldn't abandon Snow for her. Just like at the end of the film (not the book!) of the Wizard of Oz where they gaslight Dorothy into believing it was all a dream, she sees all the other “delinquent” kids, who were actually just kids in a psychiatric hospital and recognises them from her dream. Now they are all wearing jeans and white t-shirts to prove they are in a different setting than black t-shirt survival camp. Then the nurse comes in and SHOCK! HORROR! She looks just like her stepmother. She also has a hugh-jass needle because needles are scary, kids!

Comingsoon.net says And whoever said this movie is like “Children of the Corn Meets A Nightmare on Elm Street” needs their head examined and I would agree. Also the cover art features Snow in a sexy white dress covered in blood, red stilettos which would be impossible to wear in the woods and an axe which never features in the film.

Overall, this was terrible. But it did give us a few unintentional laughs.

That’s all for this week. Stay tuned next week for a more conventional film starring Julia Roberts as the stepmother.