LITTLE DARLINGS

It's Summer Camp season! Ferris (Tatum O’Neal) is well-educated, well-traveled and a child of privilege. Angel (Kristy McNichol) is “cool”, streetwise and tough. They’re brought together for a summer of camp where intended fun and friendship quickly turn to rivalries. With bets placed, the other campers choose sides as Ferris and Angel are goaded on: whoever loses her virginity first… wins! Amid classic camp conflicts—food fights, sneak-outs and crushes—Angel and Ferris deal with their own growing sexual awareness. This movie uses the same essential premise as dozens of disposable 80s boner-jams, but its honesty and innocence elevate it into a totally unique register.

“I love how hysterically sex suffuses the film, from locker room talk in the rest stop bathroom to girls screaming as they split open a stolen condom dispenser like a prophylactic piñata. Yet LITTLE DARLINGS’ emotional center is the girls’ confessional relationship, where both are moved to admit that ‘it’ – which stretches to include both doing it and not – is nothing like what books, movies, and rumours have suggested. ‘I’m not a woman,’ says Angel. Which reminds me both of the queerness implicit to the film (and to the homosocial experience of girls’ camp, writ large) and of the extra-textual queer shadow cast by stars McNichol, O’Neal and Cynthia Nixon each having since come out.” - Veronica Fitzpatrick, Cleo