Watched The Ugly Stepsister to get my Fairy Tale square for horror movie bingo … Body horror Cinderella from the POV of a stepsister is a very good idea and the body horror was real gross (👍️) but I found it surprisingly dull overall.
Beautifully and intentionally made, fantastic lead performance, but very slow paced and suffers from the same problem as most Feminist Horror: its ideas don’t go beyond Feminism 101.
I did enjoy the inversion of some gothic tropes, with the concerns about inheritance and family legacy all from the women’s perspectives, and a father’s corpse secretly rotting in the cellar instead of a mad wife in the attic.
I would pair The Ugly Stepsister with Sexykiller, which is another alternate-POV horror, this time a slasher where the killer is one of the naked college girls from the opening locker room scene. It is more silly on the surface, but explores much stranger and more interesting feminist themes.