In
The Sopranos, Vito Jr. gets sent to one of these places, right down to the
snatch-and-grab. How well known were these practices in the early 2000s?
WWASPS kids were putting shit up on geocities in the 90s.
On a related note, I've read
Joe vs. Elan, are there any other dramatizations?
Cruel Instruction is so bad it's probably worth a rifftrax, Holes is a thing, Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare is a thing but I haven't seen that. The problem with most dramatizations or portrayals is while you can see people did their research, the execution is "sugar with a little coffee in it" or so watered down it's basically homeopathy.
I watched Cruel Instruction and felt like they "got it", on one level, but were forced to make it into something digestible and palatable for idiots with weak constitutions. It's a Lifetime movie. We know who watches Lifetime. It touches on things, but then it handles the gruesomeness of it all with the depth and horror of a kid chewing with their mouth open to make you gag during lunch in 3rd grade. Doing this right should be visceral and painful. You should feel sick. This missed that mark. They say "dial nine", but there's absolutely none of the brutality of the program that term came from.
Maybe I'm too bitter to be ruffled by what ruffles normal people? Meh. I think it's like a highschool production, personally.
A few things that really should have been scary were not handled right. Firstly, the "booty juice" scene was a flop to me. Miss Connie(Camryn Manheim, looks like Cathy Bates) pulling down Kayla Adams's(Kelcey Mawema) pants and the framing of her ass cheek wasn't a horror at all, it was ridiculous, and it did not have the violence or suddenness or resistance that goes with the real deal. She was pushed into a wall, not on the ground, and it was not nearly as violent as it should have been. Mawema did the best she could with the direction and the rest of the film being what it was, that's not her fault, but ugh. She also woke up in creepy colored light OP with very loose medical restraints.
The biggest sin is they had a clueless parent as a MISS SCHEFF when Sue Scheff is really a grifting cunt. Come the fuck on, Lifetime.
Secondly, when Kayla tried to hang herself (SPOILERS!??!) it was obviously a prop, and, after being cut down unceremoniously from unconsciousness, instead of going to a hospital as you would really have to if you hung that long, she was just punished with kid gloves, not the "we will make you wish you were dead now" beating that comes from suicide attempts. She was instead made to sit in the hall in a chair and stare at a wall for a little while then put in a relatively large store room with magenta lights instead of the claustrophobic starkness of every other isolation room in every other fucking program. Why the director decided to throw in the creepy colored lights is beyond me, but fucking with angles and lights in a sloppy way distracts you from the subject matter and makes you instead look at how amateur the production is.
Thirdly, they had a kid leave a bathroom, crying, with a male staffer immediately leave afterward. This was an implication of sexual abuse, but it was handled really sloppily, in a "blink and you'll miss it" kind of way, and Miss Connie told the staffer little more than "ugh stop being so sloppy with raping the kids here already. Anyway go deal with the trouble maker, Kayla."
They made an attempt to do the attack therapy shit, but it didn't feel alive or real at all. You can tell the cinematographer was like "I want to do stuff with lights and shadows!" at random times. You of course had the shadow of a crucifix on a wall in some scenes but it was honestly bullshit, since the program this was based on was entirely secular. I think it was just put in to pander, same with the teenage hand holding romance subplot that just felt retarded and unlike the desperate attempt to find comfort and solace in hell that would be the reality, but again, this is for Lifetime movie wine moms I guess.
Finally, the freedom the kids had to mingle was really jarring. That lesbian hand holding kissy uwu subplot was ended by simply separating the two girls. In reality, there would be very public humiliation that they would be subjected to, and for that matter, extreme violence and a long time in isolation.
Meh.
