Producers: Warner Davis and Todd Friedman Director: Daniel DelPurgatorio Screenplay: Andy Greskoviak Cast: Kue Lawrence, Kai Cech, Giorgia Whigham, Max Malas, Maxwell Whittington-Cooper, Pierson Fodé, Alysia Reiner, Corbin Bernsen, Paul Soter, Geoffrey James, Samantha Neyland Trumdo, Sutton Johnson, Jordyn Raya James, Dylan Friedman, Winston Vengapally and Todd M. Friedman Distributor: Hemlock Productions
Grade: C
Give “Marshmallow” credit for trying something different. But though he’s managed to draw better-than-average performances from his cast of pre-teens, Daniel DelPurgatorio’s mash-up of horror and sci-fi proves ultimately less than the sum of its many parts.
Andy Greskoviak’s script begins as a coming-of-age study of Morgan (Kue Lawrence), a young boy traumatized by a near-death experience in the family swimming pool. It then turns into a tale of a summer camp where a scary story told by a counselor at a campfire about a murderous doctor proves all too real. Then it veers into sci-fi territory as the true nature of the camp is revealed. Imagine a weird mixture of a pre-teen “Friday the 13th” and a sort of “Stepford Kids,” all told with a “Stand by Me” vibe.
At first Morgan, a frail bullied kid with a haircut that looks as though his overprotective mother (Alysia Reiner) does it with a bowl and scissors, is reluctant to go off to camp, but he’s persuaded to give it a try by his beloved Grandpa Roy (Corbin Bernsen), who intervened when the boy was flailing around in the pool. Unfortunately, just before Morgan is set to depart, Roy has a heart attack and expires on the kitchen floor. That tragedy darkens Morgan’s arrival at the camp, where nasty CJ (Sutton Johnson) emerges as his new nemesis.
Fortunately he soon acquires a set of friends in fellow misfits chubby Dirk (Max Malas), undersized Sam (Dylan Friedman) and brainy Raj (Winston Vengapally). He also attracts a girlfriend, feisty Pilar (Kai Cech). They come in handy when Morgan actually sees the mad doctor whose history of murder, mutilation and gruesome Frankenstein-like experimentation had been told around the campfire by chirpy counselor Rachel (Giorgia Whigham) and has been keeping him awake. Rachel’s just one of a bunch—including beefy Kazswar (Pierson Fodé), soft-spoken Franklin (Maxwell Whittington-Cooper) and mustachioed Avery (Geoffrey James)—whose attentiveness to their charges seems rather limited, though camp director Collins (Paul Soter) tries to ensure they toe the line.
What that line involves is revealed when Morgan’s warnings, initially dismissed as nonsense, prove true. There follow scenes of the villain—clothed in a surgical outfit and mask with a miner’s light attached to his forehead, stalks campers, whom he zaps into unconsciousness with a glowing, taser-like rod. Our pint-sized heroes scramble to avoid him and counterattack as they can. Eventually they learn that he’s not who he seems to be, and not alone, and that the secret of the camp involves life and death in a quite peculiar way. There’s also a concluding twist that turns the hunted into hunters.
That “Marshmallow” comes off as well as it does despite a convoluted screenplay and a cast of kids is a testament to DelPurgatorio’s skill and the efforts of his crew, including production designer Lexy Pazul (blessed with an actual Kentucky camp as a location), cinematographer Filip Vandewal (who manages the dark nighttime scenes fairly well), editor Andy Palmer (whose rhythms might be slow but who makes the transitions reasonably clear) and composer Nicholas Elert (whose pulsating score is too loud but does invigorate sequences that would otherwise drag).
But in the end its reach exceeds its grasp. The youngsters in the cast outdo their elders—not just Reiner and Todd M. Friedman as her husband, both pretty awful—but the camp counselors (among whom Whigham and Fodé chew the scenery while Whittington-Cooper and James just look bland and blank eyed). Soter, meanwhile, is strangely anonymous, burying his penchant for comedy so completely that he practically disappears. As for Bernsen, one can forgive his hamminess in the early scenes, but it’s hard to tell what to make of his raging in Morgan’s later nightmares. And the effects, like the watery dream with which the movie begins, are clearly of a piece with the movie’s low budget.
“Marshmallow” is better than you might expect, just not good enough.