Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 23, 2009, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
For anyone who’s watched MTV’s reality show My Super Sweet 16, the sense of entitlement exhibited by some of its birthday girls and the obscene flaunting of wealth in the service of celebrating them can be as horrifying as any youth-slasher film. Now that the network has combined the two forms in its original movie My Super Psycho Sweet 16, it’s disappointing, but perhaps not surprising, that the result doesn’t take full advantage of the opportunity to throw some barbed satire the series’ way, preferring instead to emphasize a generic scenario of pointed objects aimed at its teen characters.
Actually, you have to take some of the protagonists’ word for their teenaged status; “You only turn 16 once,” says antiheroine Madison Penrose (Julianna Guill), who looks like she’s turned 16 at least four or five times. Madison wants to reopen the long-shuttered Roller Dome as the site of her big bash, despite a horrible past tragedy that occurred there. “Ten Years Ago,” to the tune of Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” and Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie” (and to some of us, that subtitle with that music is kinda scary), we’re shown how Roller Dome employee Charlie Rotter (Alex Van) slaughtered six young patrons after they made fun of him.
Rotter’s daughter Skye witnessed the massacre, and in the present day, she’s a Winona Ryder-esque high-school outcast (Lauren McKnight) who’s taunted by Madison and her fellow mean girls—especially when Madison’s jock ex-boyfriend Brigg (Chris Zylka) starts showing an interest in Skye. This vaguely Carrie-esque storyline gives way to I Know Where You Skated Last Summer as the extravagant party begins, Skye and her nerdy, platonic-but-wants-to-be-more pal Derek (Matt Angel) crash and someone in a mask, hood and cape ensemble begins racking up a behind-the-scenes body count. Has Charlie returned to the scene of his old crime? Probably not, since he apparently burned to death in a prisoner-van accident, so the potential culprits include the bullied Derek, who certainly has reason to off members of the popular crowd, and, briefly, a sleazy Roller Dome employee who puts the moves on Madison. (“Are you sure you’re 16? You look way older to me,” he says, perhaps making an inside joke.)
Every so often, there’s a satirical moment involving the spoiled Madison’s exorbitant demands for her party, but the movie wants to have its birthday cake and eat it too, reveling in the trappings of wealth as often as it criticizes them. For the most part, it’s content to spin its conventional minidramas among the young people in between the scenes where they’re stalked and slain. Most of these are standard-issue in conception as well, though it must be said that Jacob Gentry, in an odd choice of follow-up to helming the middle third of The Signal, directs the heck out of My Super Psycho’s horror material. With cinematographer Thomas Bingham, he drenches the screen in eye-catching lighting tricks that lend more visual excitement than you usually find in a made-for-TV flick.
There’s more onscreen bloodshed than you’d expect in one as well, and at least two moments that are so black-humoredly nasty that they play as pretty audacious in this teen-targeted context. One occurs during the climax, where it’s sandwiched between a revelation that’s such a non-twist that it almost qualifies as a surprise, and a conclusion that incorporates one of the genre’s unfortunate clichés. On the whole, though, and taken for what it is, My Super Psycho Sweet 16 is a decent enough diversion for those—diehards and young newbies alike—seeking a simple, swift (it runs about 80 minutes without end credits), old-fashioned and untaxing slasher experience. As fright fare aimed at the junior-high and high-school set, it’s certainly a better bet to watch for free than paying for a ticket to the pandering Stepfather remake.
