It struck me that a lot of stuff hit various streaming services this past Friday. Hulu dropped the latest installment of the Predator franchise, Prey. Netflix dropped the first season of its adaptation of the Sandman graphic novel series that I will probably be covering on an episodic basis over on Gabbing Geek once I finish the current season of The Boys. Apple TV+ put up an animated feature called Luck. Amazon Prime Video released Ron Howard’s latest Thirteen Lives. And over on Peacock, there was They/Them, a throwback to 80s slasher movies set at a gay conversion camp and starring Kevin Bacon, a man whose earliest roles included a doomed camp counselor in the original Friday the 13th.
I opted to go with They/Them next mostly because it was shorter than the others and I could get it in before I had to head out for the day Saturday. Would I regret that?
After an opening scene where a motorist is killed in the middle of nowhere, the movie cuts to Whistler Camp where a group of LGBTQ+ young people are going to be staying for a week. The introductory remarks by owner/operator Owen Whistler (Bacon) seem friendly enough. He even says he won’t be mentioning God once after his opening remarks, but then he asks the campers to separate by gender into one of two cabins. That’s a problem for Jordan (Theo Germaine) seeing as they are both trans and nonbinary, asking that Owen use their preferred pronouns of “they/them”. In the meantime, they can stay in the boys’ cabin. However, whatever friendly atmosphere the camp established is soon shattered as the various camp employees, from Owen to his wife Cora (Carrie Preston) who acts as the camp therapist to various other employees who apparently all graduated from the program successfully (or so they claim) all seem set to make the campers suffer until they become heterosexuals. The one exception is the camp nurse Molly (Anna Chlumsky), but she’s a new hire.
However, that killer from the opening scene, an axe-welding maniac dressed in a rubber mask and a hooded poncho, is still out there, making the horrors of the camp potentially even moreso for the campers. Jordan seems to be the sort of person who can perhaps takes care of themself, but are they the killer? Or is it someone else? And what does this killer even want? And, for that matter, are Owen and the other people working for him far more dangerous?
So, I didn’t have a lot of hope for this one. I perked up a little when I saw the Blumhouse logo at the start of the movie. That’s no guarantee that the movie will be good, but it does suggest that there could be some really creative ideas at play here given Blumhouse’s reputation for being hand’s off as a production company so long as the movie comes in on the agreed upon budget. Alas, such is not the case here. There are some very tense scenes, all of them involving Jordan and their dealings with either Owen or Cora and how the Whistlers emphasize traditional gender roles in a manner that the movie But I’m a Cheerleader played with satirically. What the Whistlers and their employees do is clearly taking a toll on the campers, but the movie didn’t quite work as well as it should.
However, the treatment of the campers by the counselors was actually the more effective part of the movie. The slasher killer doesn’t really do much until the last thirty or so minutes, and who the killer is isn’t really all that much of a surprise. The end result is a movie that is more of a mess than it should be. Perhaps a more balanced approach, giving the two threats more equal time, might have made for a better movie, but in the end, it just doesn’t work, even with Bacon giving a pretty good performance all told.
Grade: C-
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