Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 23, 2004, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
When a movie is described as a “lesbian slasher film,” the viewer can reasonably expect one of a few things: a deconstruction of traditional cinematic gender roles, a movie in which women’s typical victim status in stalker flicks is subverted or at least a politically incorrect good time. Make a Wish, however, does little for either the sapphic or slasher film fields; it plays like the product of either lesbian filmmakers trying to produce something commercial, or exploitationeers angling for some festival/art-house play. In the latter, at least, it has succeeded, securing a berth at New York’s Two Boots Pioneer Theater and assorted fests.
Press from the filmmakers and some of those festivals has described Make a Wish as a humorous slant on psycho-film standards, but there’s little in the way of intentional humor on view, nor anything resembling a satiric edge. The only gender politics explored involve one woman who has switched from being a same-team player to dating a boorish Fabio lookalike, but that situation is only explored as long as it takes to set the guy up as a potential villain. Mostly, the script by producer Lauren Johnson is a rote repetition of countless other girls-in-the-woods-being-killed-one-by-one movies, and director Sharon Ferranti shoots it in a similarly generic, pedestrian manner.
The potential victims on hand are all former girlfriends of Susan (Moynan King), who is so curt and abrasive most of the time that it’s no wonder she’s got so many exes out there. And it’s little surprise that, among the group who agree to join Susan for a birthday camping trip, all of them left her, with the exception of cute Wiccan Dawn (Hollace Starr), whom Susan has just dumped. More perplexing is why they would all want to spend a weekend in the Texas woods with Susan, but off they go into the wild, with the aforementioned resentful boyfriend, a local redneck and a detective with a mysterious purpose serving as the requisite male suspects.
With an irony-free adherence to genre conventions (the black member of the group is the first to go), Ferranti and Johnson trudge through the standard scenario on the way to a listless and prolonged finale. There’s a decent amount of interpersonal tension and drama thrown in, but not much empathy since these women are as immature about sex and relationships as they are helpless at survival. The inevitable girl-on-girl action doesn’t generate much heat either, since Ferranti is more interested in Cinemax-style hand-on-torso close-ups than actually expressing the women’s ardor for each other. Her murder scenes are similarly dispassionate, lacking atmosphere and horrific snap, and her and Johnson’s only real creative achievement is setting up a successful and fairly subtle red herring. They’ve also saddled the movie with a title that hardly suggests its horrific or dramatic content, and that makes no sense until the film’s very end. Don’t think about it too hard, or you’ll see through what little sense of mystery Make a Wish possesses.
