If Roger Ebert didn’t coin the phrase “dead teenager movie,” he famously owns it by virtue of inclusion in his ’80s-filmgoer’s glossary. On this far side of that decade’s slasher craze, you don’t need the term defined; you know exactly what it entails. Quinn Armstrong’s Dead Teenagers knows you know, and sets out to subvert the subgenre with a good upending.
The final chapter of Armstrong’s Fresh Hell trilogy, Dead Teenagers plops five hormone-addled high school friends in a woods-adjacent cabin — the same location for the other two movies, in fact. Right away, cocky jock Ethan (Angel Ray, 2023’s Malum) breaks up with Mandy (newcomer Jordan Myers). After all, he’s college-bound and “pussy ’bout to be, like, pow-pow-pow!” Clearly, the actors are too old to play this young, but rather than being a deficit, the choice soon is revealed as intentional.
Mandy’s heartbreak and Ethan’s thoughtless timing get shoved aside by strange events; in the forest, she finds a piece of equipment from the shoot of Fresh Hell’s first chapter, The Exorcism of Saint Patrick, as well as script pages for Dead Teenagers, the very movie we’re watching. Then a hulking man whose face is hidden behind a welding mask shows up to slaughter; like every slasher villain, he comes with an exploitable name: Torch (Chris Hahn, 2021’s Wrong Turn remake).
Mandy and friends suddenly realize they’re in a movie; this inadvertent act of self-awareness amounts to improvisation, changing the course of what’s supposed to happen. Incidental characters who pop into the story continue to play their part as scripted, because they only exist on the page; thus, most notably, a cop (Beau Roberts, returning from Saint Patrick) exchanges blows with someone who’s not even present.
As you’ve likely already assumed, Dead Teenagers doesn’t just go meta, but doubles, even triples down on doing so. Its postmodern nature is not of the arch Scream variety, but a textbook deconstruction so thorough, its footnotes have footnotes.
Ambitious? That’s putting it lightly. Although Armstrong doesn’t quite wring it into being fully successful, he has enough tricks — such as Mandy happening upon a crew van or entering a time loop — to make the Fresh Hell entry the most fully realized. If you watch only one among the trio, this should be it. —Rod Lott