Once Upon a Dumpster Fire
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so magnificently awful it defies genre, logic, and human endurance. Snow White: A Deadly Summer is one such cinematic miracle. Directed by David DeCoteau—patron saint of low-budget horror and shirtless extras—it’s a “modern reimagining” of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale, in the same way that burning toast is a “modern reimagining” of bread.
It stars Shanley Caswell, Maureen McCormick (yes, Marcia from The Brady Bunch), and Eric Roberts, who, by the looks of it, filmed all his scenes in one afternoon between better-paying gigs. The result? A movie that feels like it was written by a Roomba that once overheard someone describing Snow White and Friday the 13th at the same time.
Mirror, Mirror, Who Greenlit This?
Let’s start with the stepmother, Eve (McCormick). She’s evil, sure—but not in the fun Disney way. Her entire villainy consists of staring into a mirror and talking to her own reflection, which sounds like every actor’s nightmare and every therapist’s field day. Her mirror doesn’t even talk back—it’s just her own voice, giving herself bad advice. It’s less “magical artifact of doom” and more “lonely woman rehearsing insults before brunch.”
Her grand scheme? She sends her stepdaughter, Snow (Caswell), to a boot camp for juvenile delinquents, where kids are being mysteriously murdered. Why? Because she’s jealous of her stepdaughter’s relationship with her husband, Grant (Eric Roberts), a man so disengaged he could be replaced by a coat rack wearing a Bluetooth headset. Seriously, Roberts spends the entire movie looking like he’s wondering when lunch is.
Camp Blood… But Make It Boring
Once Snow arrives at “camp,” the movie transforms into something resembling a slasher film—if the slasher had a strict union-mandated nap schedule. The camp, supposedly for troubled teens, looks suspiciously like an abandoned office park with trees Photoshopped in later. The counselors look too old to be believable, and the kids look too bored to be in danger.
One by one, people start dying, though you wouldn’t know it unless someone explicitly says, “Oh no, they’re dead.” The kills are so tame they could play on the Hallmark Channel. A few are off-screen, one or two are implied, and the rest happen with the kind of editing that suggests someone accidentally sneezed on the Final Cut timeline.
To spice things up, Snow has “visions” of each murder in her dreams. These dreams are less prophetic and more like low-budget music videos from 2003—overexposed lighting, heavy filters, and acting that screams “high school drama elective.” Apparently, her psychic abilities allow her to know what the killer is doing, but not enough to stop anyone from dying or to warn the audience when something interesting might happen.
Acting So Wooden, the Trees Should Sue
Shanley Caswell does her best as Snow, which is like trying to perform Hamlet in a Walmart parking lot during a power outage. She spends most of her screen time looking mildly inconvenienced by the plot. To her credit, she delivers every terrible line with full sincerity, which makes it all the more hilarious.
Maureen McCormick, bless her, is the only one who seems aware she’s in a terrible movie—and she leans into it like a camp queen rediscovering melodrama. Every time she hisses at the mirror or smirks at the camera, you can almost hear her agent whispering, “It’s a paycheck, Marcia.”
And then there’s Eric Roberts, the patron saint of “sure, I’ll be in your movie.” He spends the film lounging in his study, giving lines that sound like they were delivered from memory five minutes after reading the script. Roberts’ scenes could’ve been filmed on a green screen in his own living room for all the connection he has to the rest of the cast. Which, honestly, might have been the case.
The Killer Revealed (Sort Of)
Eventually—mercifully—the killer is revealed, though by that point, you’ve probably lost all interest and several IQ points. The twist tries to be shocking but lands like a wet paper bag. It’s one of those endings where you think, “Wait, that’s it?” before realizing you don’t actually care who did it.
The final showdown is as exciting as watching someone fold laundry with ominous music. There’s some shouting, a half-hearted chase, and then—credits. No catharsis, no blood, no resolution. Just the sweet release of the end credits, where you can finally confirm this wasn’t a fever dream.
Visuals Courtesy of a 2005 Laptop
DeCoteau, who’s directed everything from softcore vampire movies to A Talking Cat!?, brings his signature aesthetic here: cheap lighting, awkward close-ups, and so much filler footage you start suspecting time itself has stopped. Every scene looks like it was filmed using a webcam covered in Vaseline.
The movie’s color grading gives everything a weird, orange tint, as if the entire cast lives under a perpetual sunset—or in a tanning bed. The editing is so disjointed it’s like watching someone channel surf between three bad movies that happen to share the same actors.
And let’s not forget the soundtrack, which is approximately three public-domain tracks on loop. One of them sounds suspiciously like a demo from a free keyboard app. The music swells dramatically every time someone blinks, as if trying to convince you something important just happened. It didn’t.
Horror Without Horror
Horror is a strong word for what this movie attempts. There’s no tension, no scares, and no gore to speak of. The scariest thing about it is the acting. The film is so sanitized it could be used to clean medical instruments. You could show it to children as punishment for enjoying good movies.
Even the mirror scenes—clearly intended to be eerie—end up looking like rejected perfume commercials. “Evil by Eve,” coming soon to a CVS near you.
A Lesson in Pain
But let’s give credit where it’s due: Snow White: A Deadly Summer is unintentionally hilarious. It’s the kind of bad movie that becomes a group activity—a cinematic endurance test to see who breaks first. There’s a kind of masochistic joy in watching something this incompetently made. Like eating an entire cake made of salt, it’s awful but fascinating.
Somewhere, in a parallel universe, this could have worked. A dark fairy-tale reimagining with psychological horror and genuine menace? Sure, that sounds great. Unfortunately, we live in this universe, where the most frightening thing about Snow White: A Deadly Summer is how many people were paid to make it.
Happily Never After
By the end, you realize the real horror isn’t the killer or the mirror—it’s the 90 minutes you’ll never get back. Still, it’s hard to stay mad. The movie is so earnestly bad that it loops back around to being strangely charming. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a high school talent show where everyone forgets their lines, but you clap anyway because they tried.
Final Judgment
Snow White: A Deadly Summer is a fairy tale gone feral—a movie that manages to take one of the most iconic stories ever told and turn it into a padded, lifeless slog. It’s not scary, it’s not sexy, and it’s not even particularly coherent. But it is funny, mostly by accident.
Final Score: ★½ — Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the worst of them all? This movie, without question. But hey, at least Eric Roberts got paid.
