Advertised as a "the first lesbian slasher movie by & for lesbians," the director alleged that of the $100,000 filming budget, only $500 was apportioned to make-up FX. It should perhaps have been adverised as, at most, a lesbian thriller, as for that FX budget there is less gore than can be seen on television's CSI.
The non-story has nothing unfamiliar about it: Gay women are picked off one by one until the killer is revealed at the end. The acting is fair, certainly not good, but instead of the ultra-amateur over-acting so often encountered in cheap slashers, these performances are so restrained the actors must've thought they were in a Eugene O'Neill play.
There is some flat-chested babe on flat-chested babe action but not much of that so it fails on the sex-o-meter as much as it fails on the gore-o-graph.
To stretch such stuff to feature length, it is 95% lesbian soap opera as the group of alternatingly whiny & slutty lesbians work out their troubled relationships in the raw environs of a tidy national park camp-out.
The caricatured dykes include a femme bisexual who lives with a guy & denies she's gay even while being the second-horniest dyke in the woods; a vegan too stupid to bring her own food but peevish that her special diet requirements can't be fulfilled by rummaging around in other women's picnic supplies; the unfaithful butch; the whinest of whiny wiccans performing moronic little "witchuals" of no consequence; the "never had to fend for herself" heiress so spoiled rich she doesn't even know how to pee in the woods.
These caricatures exist in real life but the actors bring no particular depth to any of them. Since they're only present to get picked off, it probably doesn't matter that these are not real "characters" whose fates might actually matter.
Plus they keep making "rational" excuses for why they're all vanishing one by one, so the message here has got to be "lesbians are dim bulbs."
It's a well-intended project & perhaps the first lesbian slasher aimed at actual lesbian viewers, though there have been plenty of lesbian psycho films in the past, the classics including The Mafu Cage (1979) & Butterfly Kiss. (1996).
But Make a Wish has got no gore, nothing to shock, nothing even slightly scary, no plot twists, nothing especially sexy, & worst of all, not one moment of humor. It's got nothing.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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