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‘My Super Psycho Sweet 16’ – MTV’s Attempt at a Slasher Franchise

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My Super Psycho Sweet 16

It’s easy to forget just how revolutionary MTV was back when it first went on the air, with the channel quickly becoming a staple of youth culture during the 80s and 90s. Of course, interests change over time, and the music-focused giant was eventually forced to make a few concessions in order to compete with rival channels. This led to MTV investing heavily in reality programming during the 2000s, which many claim to be the beginning of the end when it comes to their original brand.

One of these reality shows happened to be 2005’s My Super Sweet 16, which dove into the drama-filled world of extravagant teenage birthday parties. While I was only tangentially aware of the show back in the day, it was actually a massive hit and even garnered its own feature film spin-off in 2007. However, this peculiar little program would also become the basis for MTV’s My Super Psycho Sweet 16, a bizarre slasher franchise satirizing the original show’s petty conflicts and themes.

It’s now been a decade since the premiere of the third and final entry in the series, and while these made-for-TV flicks didn’t exactly have a lasting impact (especially since they’ve become rather hard to acquire), I’d like to take this opportunity to look back on MTV’s first attempt at their very own horror franchise.

Strangely enough, it was the network itself that originally approached director Jacob Gentry with their idea for a horror-centric adaptation of their popular show. The director had already been featured on MTV in the past, with the channel airing his Terminator 3 fan film when he was just fifteen years old, but he also had experience in the horror genre after co-directing 2007’s underrated The Signal. The only problem was that Gentry was clearly not a fan of reality TV, openly admitting that he considered it one of the lowest forms of entertainment.

My Super Psycho Sweet 16 mtv

What’s scarier than teen drama?

In a bizarre turn of events, this actually worked out for the best, as the director ended up realizing that the absurd situations and characters depicted in the show were already the perfect setup for a traditional slasher flick. Partnering with writers Scott Thomas and Jed Elinoff, Gentry soon had a weirdly entertaining mish-mash of teen drama and horror tropes on his hands, which could appeal to both fans of the original property and horror junkies alike.

Airing during the Halloween season of 2009 after a promotional theatrical release, My Super Psycho Sweet 16 stars Lauren McKnight as Skye Rotter, a teenage outcast whose father was responsible for a horrific mass murder at the local roller-skating rink. Unfortunately, the spoiled high-schooler Madison Penrose (Julianna Guill) insists on having her sixteenth birthday party at that very same Roller Dome, eventually leading to the unexpected return of Skye’s murderous dad during an unforgettable Sweet 16.

An uncomplicated teen horror flick, My Super Psycho Sweet 16 doesn’t reinvent the slasher wheel, but it doesn’t really have to. The birthday setting and appropriately dramatic teenage characters are interesting enough, with McKnight standing out as a memorable final girl and Guill turning in a respectable performance as a spoiled brat. The “Lord of the Rink” killer is also pretty cool, sporting a medieval motif as he takes down partygoers with swords and axes. I’d argue that the only real flaw here is the overall lack of brutality, as even the unrated version feels a bit tame.

Either way, the movie was a big hit for MTV, receiving mostly positive reviews and impressive ratings. That’s why it’s no surprise that a sequel was greenlit almost immediately, with Gentry and his team coming back for more the following year. Featuring a larger budget and more ambitious kills, the follow-up was bigger and meaner than the original without losing any of the teen soap-opera charm.

My Super Psycho Sweet 16 slasher

Family is forever. Wait, wrong slasher movie…

Once again starring McKnight as Skye Rotter, the sequel sees our traumatized protagonist move in with her estranged mother after fleeing the scene at the end of the first film. While it initially appears that Skye has earned a fresh start, her inevitable 16th birthday party ends up attracting unwanted attention, with old friends and psychotic enemies returning for yet another Sweet 16 murder spree.

Airing in October of 2010, My Super Psycho Sweet 16: Part 2 is a surprisingly solid follow-up to an already entertaining movie. It still feels like 90210 meets I Know What You Did Last Summer, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Skye remains a memorably edgy protagonist and her teenage worries are compelling enough to make you not root for the killer, who remains appropriately threatening (though a little less over-the-top with his medieval antics).

This one was another hit for MTV, but judging by what happened to the third film, it’s likely that it wasn’t quite as popular as the original. The network still ended up commissioning another sequel, but the film suffered a few delays and it appears that budgets got slashed somewhere along the way. This resulted in a final entry that doesn’t quite live up to the standard of its predecessors.

In 2012’s My Super Psycho Sweet 16: Part 3, Skye is invited to her estranged half-sister’s 16th birthday party before heading off to college. Things obviously don’t go according to plan, as it appears that the birthday curse lives on. With bodies beginning to pile, Skye once again has to face off against old enemies during yet another blood-soaked celebration.

My Super Psycho Sweet 16 horror

‘Lord of the Rink’ is one of the all-time best Slasher villain names.

Part 3 is still somewhat entertaining in its own right, but it lacks some of the charm present in previous entries. This is mostly due to the less-intimidating killer and the isolated country house setting, which is arguably the least interesting of the bunch. It also doesn’t help that the titular Sweet 16 is attended by a mere handful of characters, limiting the thrills in both quantity and quality. It may bring a satisfying conclusion to Skye’s story, but I often skip this one when re-watching the franchise.

These made-for-TV movies obviously aren’t for everyone, as the schlocky writing and teenage sensibilities may get on some viewers’ nerves, but I see this trilogy as a fun prototype for future teen-oriented horror shows like Scream and American Horror Story. While I think you’d probably get more out of the experience if you were a teenager yourself when you first watched the trilogy, there’s still a lot to love about these cheesy birthday massacres.

The peculiar mix of soap-opera styled drama and classic horror tropes makes My Super Psycho Sweet 16 surprisingly memorable, and I particularly enjoy how McKnight’s protagonist becomes more complex as the films go on. The MTV-approved soundtracks also serve as a musical time capsule of the late-2000s to early-2010s that’s sure to entertain the more nostalgic horror hounds out there.

Before the horror renaissance of the mid-2010s, TV horrors were few and far in between. That’s why I believe the My Super Psycho Sweet 16 trilogy stands out as a fun introduction to the horror genre for an audience that might never have seen a Slasher flick before. These movies may have suffered from watered-down kills and budgetary constraints due to their made-for-TV origins, but I think they’re still worth revisiting for their soap opera thrills and festive kills. At the very least, I’d say that they’re a hell of a lot more fun than the original My Super Sweet 16 show.

Born Brazilian, raised Canadian, Luiz is a writer and Film student that spends most of his time watching movies and subsequently complaining about them.

Editorials

‘The Company of Wolves’ at 40: One of the Most Underrated Werewolf Movies Ever Made

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There’s a compelling idea in anthropology that many ancient werewolf legends are derived from our species’ need to rationalize the more animalistic side of humanity – which is why lycanthropy has historically been used to explain everything from medieval serial killers to cannibalism. While I personally think there’s a lot more to unpack when it comes to tales of wolfmen and women, this is still a great example of why so many of our most enduring fairy tales involve big bad wolves.

And in the world of film, I think there’s only one feature that really nails the folkloric origins of werewolf stories, namely Neil Jordan’s 1984 fairy-tale horror classic, The Company of Wolves. Even four decades later, there’s no other genre flick that comes close to capturing the dreamlike ambience behind this strange anthology, and that’s why I’d like to take this opportunity to look back on one of the most underrated werewolf flicks ever made.

The Company of Wolves was originally a short story contained in the 1979 anthology The Bloody Chamber, a collection of deconstructed fairy-tales intended for mature readers penned by English author Angela Carter. With the book quickly becoming a hit as readers became fascinated with its subversion of classic folk stories and (then) controversial feminist undertones, it was soon transformed into a duology of BBC radio-dramas which adapted both The Company of Wolves and Carter’s reimagining of Puss-in-Boots.

These radio-dramas soon attracted the attention of then up-and-coming Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan, who decided to meet with Carter to discuss expanding on her stories and bringing them to life on the big screen. The duo soon realized that a single short story wasn’t enough material for a feature-length film, so they decided to adapt all of Carter’s werewolf tales into a single anthology.

With a completed script and a $2.3 million budget, Jordan decided to tackle the project like a hybrid between a theatrical period drama and a schlocky monster movie. Effects-heavy creature features were a hot commodity back in the ’80s, with films like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London proving that there was an audience for horrific lycanthrope transformations, so the director soon recruited a team that could turn this odd collection of feminist folk stories into something commercially viable.

Not exactly a great pick for family movie night.

Shooting would eventually take place almost entirely within the England-based Shepperton Studios, with notable production designer Anton Furst (who would later be known for his work on Tim Burton’s Batman films) helping to bring Jordan’s vision of a darkly romantic fairy-tale world to life. Appropriately enough, production would also involve a real pack of trained wolves (as well as a collection of dyed dogs), though extensive puppetry and animatronics were also used to flesh out the more gruesome parts of the flick.

After a grueling nine-week shoot where budgetary constraints led to corners being cut on props and costumes, The Company of Wolves was finally released in September of 1984 – just in time for spooky season. In the finished film, we follow the strange dreams of a sulky teenage girl named Rosaleen (first-time actress Sarah Patterson) as the film unravels an Arabian-Nights-inspired tapestry of both familiar and not-so-familiar stories about big bad wolves.

From sexually charged cautionary tales to parables about female empowerment, this surreal collection of deranged bedtime stories is much more than the creature feature that the marketing initially suggested. Like a more horror-oriented version of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, The Company of Wolves exudes that same kind of hormonal teenage energy that transports us back to a time when the world was both scary and exciting in equal measure.

That’s not to say that this is an entirely pleasant experience, however, and I’m not just talking about the film’s horror elements. A big portion of the flick’s overtly sexual moments involve the then 13-year-old Patterson coming to grips with her blossoming womanhood and the dangers of predatory men (usually marked with a humorous unibrow), something that naturally makes for some intentionally uncomfortable viewing – especially in the year of our lord 2024.

Obviously, I don’t think it’s my place to dissect (or even judge) the effectiveness of the film’s commentaries on being a young woman, but even as a man I can still appreciate the thought and care that went into crafting this Jungian cocktail of serious themes in a genre-movie package that almost certainly went on to inspire future werewolf movies like Ginger Snaps.

Not the worst wedding I’ve been to.

That being said, what really keeps me coming back to the film is the absurd amount of memorable imagery. From a wedding party being taken over by canines to lonely treks through snowy groves, this is exactly the gloomy world I imagined as a child when reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales – and the dreamy atmosphere is only enhanced by the movie’s overall theatricality.

This also extends to the effects, as it’s easy to forgive decapitated dummy heads and ripped rubber skin when everything is happening in a magical hyper-reality, with a great example of this is being the scene where Grandma’s head unexpectedly explodes like a porcelain doll when it’s knocked off by a wolfman. That’s not to say that the effects are bad, as several of these transformations are downright grisly and likely influenced future lycanthrope effects like those in Underworld and even Trick ‘r Treat (even if the wolf-dogs here often look more cute than scary).

Of course, these aren’t the only things that The Company of Wolves has going for it, as the main trio of Patterson, Micha Bergese and the late, great Angela Lansbury exceptionally bring these exaggerated caricatures to life and the orchestral score is an absolute delight. I also really get a kick out of that bizarre ending implying that the dangers of adult life have literally come crashing into Rosaleen’s bedroom.

The Company of Wolves may not be a perfect film, suffering from some wonky pacing and the classic anthology problem where some stories are clearly much more enjoyable than others, but I’d argue that the flick’s iconic visuals and powerful thematic throughline more than make up for any minor flaws. And while we’ve seen bigger and better werewolf films since then, when it comes to adult-oriented fairy-tales, this is one psycho-sexual journey that is still worth revisiting 40 years down the line.

The Company of Wolves

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