Fire Island (2023)
2/10
A waste of the time I spent watching it.
30 October 2023
Warning: Spoilers
Okay. I'm definitely the target audience for this film. I love slasher flicks, even cheesy ones, and I'm a trans woman, so the Queer Horror aspect is generally appreciated very much!

I'll start with the reason I even gave it 2 stars:

The acting and what special effects there were? Pretty good. The characters were generally pretty believable, if unlikable at times, and it had a few genuinely good jump scares and a few moments of well built tension, as well.

I was actively rooting for the final girl and final boy to survive, as they were the most likeable of the five main characters.

But this movie made very little sense and felt like it strung 2-3 different scripts together to try and tie everything together. Again, I LOVE slasher flicks, even cheesy 80s ones where they didn't always know what they're doing, but this was just...

For a second, I thought it was jumping back and forth in the timeline because the older gay couple in their nice place seemed to mention something about a body being found out in the water a year prior, and with the ending, it could all tie together in a weird way...

But no, it really was just about someone "driven crazy" by isolation and murdering people.

I ended up having to watch this movie over a couple days because I'd invested 15-20 minutes into it already and wanted to give it a chance, but despite finally being able to manage the attention span, until the last bit I really didn't find myself wanting to finish it.

I was, as I said, rooting for the final boy and the final girl, but rather than let the hero escape, he dies and the killer moves on to keep killing again, meaning the police... never found all the bodies in that hotel?

Add in all the bad sound editing, and I do mean BAD (at one point I thought it was my iPad not being able to handle something, but it was just as bad on our TV) and the visible time code at the end, and it's clear that this was a movie that has only been released because of the writer and actor strikes.

I feel like with a couple quick reshoots, some better sound control and tighter editing and this could be a really good movie, but we'll likely never see those changes.

I hope this movie doesn't stop actual GOOD Queer Horror from being made because it was a flop.
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