Dead Teenagers

When I sat down to watch the 2024 horror movie "Dead Teenagers" here in 2025, I had never heard about the movie. So I didn't know what I was in for. And I suppose that meant that writer and director Quinn Armstrong had every possible chance and opportunity to entertain and impress me with the movie.

The storyline, while starting out well enough, settled into a bland, monotonous and rather pointless pace, and the narrative went from being adequate to ridiculous. So I have to say that I found very little entertainment value or enjoyment in this movie.

I was not familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, but I found the acting performances to be fair, despite the fact that I don't really get if the title of the movie was a spoof or what, as the cast wasn't exactly teenagers.

"Dead Teenagers" wasn't exactly an outstanding or memorable horror experience, and nor one that I would recommend horror fans to rush out and get to watch. Sure, I made it through the movie, but I was not particularly entertained. It is not a movie that I will return to watch a second time.

My rating of writer and director Quinn Armstrong's 2024 movie "Dead Teenagers" lands on a three out of ten stars.

Heading out into the woods, a group of friends decide to hang out before heading back to school in the fall, but when they discover the remains of a movie script depicting the group being attacked by a serial killer must try to use the pages they have to outwit and survive the situation.

This was a decent genre effort with a couple of big issues. One of the better features here is the strong and generally enjoyable setup that allows for a fine meta-variation on the genre but also the trilogy as a whole. The cabin location where it all starts is quickly shown to be the location where the other entries in the series were shot with the discovery of the previous filming equipment or scattered script pages that dictate what's to come in the film currently being played out. Invoking this element with the use of supernatural time-portals, alternate realities, and changing dynamics within the friend group based on how their perceived reactions to everything playing out around them is a bit over-the-top and difficult to make sense of everything but the creativity of doing that comes off well enough overall. With the few kills handled through solid enough practical effects, it's a good enough time on that front, but outside of this, there's not much else to this one. The fact that it's so confusing jumping around and going through different timelines and storyline beats makes everything feel far more confusing than it actually is, with the main problem being the idea of what's going on here being way too advanced an idea for this type of production to muster. Letting the whole thing run on a meta-slasher idea of the teens finding a script for a film based on their lives and trying to alter it by reading it aloud and acting it out gives this a generally lame feel instead of trying to show that the friends are altering their fate since it's too cheap to effectively do anything more than just have the same group of people stand around the same locations reading from the script as if that's supposed to change anything. That highlights just how dull and confusing this one is with the whole thing jumping around so frequently to different viewpoints and storyline universes that it's nearly impossible to figure out what's supposed to be going on or happening. It's hard to tell if the cast is supposed to be reacting to an escaped killer in the area and that was what the original script was supposed to be before it got intertwined with reality, what anything means once they start taking things way too literally, or why anything should matter at all which is the main detrimental about it all since the characters are suddenly so different from what we were introduced to that it all being character-based scenarios that we're reacting to which are then changed on the reality of what's going on so it's just immensely confusing. These all hold the film down.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.

This movie is about a group of teenagers at a cabin, and they are somehow living out a movie. They find the script and are trying to figure their way out. The movie is an hour and 20 minutes, and for the first hour, this movie was a genre shock, kind of like Cabin in the Woods and Funny Games put together. But right at the one hour mark, it takes a turn toward the bizarre and never lets up. It appears that one of the girls decides to re-write the script....which is a fine idea...but whatever she does just make the last 20 minutes a discombobulated mess that doesn't really sum things up or give an ending. And that's why I give this move a 6....about 60% of it, in my opinion, was great....that last 40% wasn't.

If you remember and loved those crazy Adult Swim Informercials like "Too Many Cooks" then strap in because this movie turns those shorts into a full length film.

Just watched this last night and I'm still thinking about it. I knew the premise going into this movie but I had no idea how weird it was going to get.

I loved it. It goes beyond the already bizarre premise of teenagers finding out they are in a horror movie.

What happens when a character walks off camera? They vanish and teleport to the next scene, leaving another character utterly alone even though they only took a few steps away.

Can a character hallucinate a previous movie that the actor playing that character was in?

If you had a dark memory of childhood abuse but you didn't know you had that memory until someone read that memory out loud to you while reading a script, what would that do to your mind?

I mean, the whole movie asks, and answers, these mind bending questions and I didn't expect that it would go this meta. I really enjoyed it. The biggest downside is the low budget. I don't care about that but I know a lot of people do so I'm addressing it.

Overall, this is one of the most inventive films I've seen in a long time and I search for the craziest stuff. Check it out.