Bree Mills’ 'Escape From Camp Conversion’ Resurrects Girlcore

This feature appears in the May issue of AVN magazine. LOS ANGELES—Award-winning Adult Time Chief Creative Officer Bree Mills is a self-professed “culture vulture” and she told AVN that one of her inspirations is the 1980s, when the teen exploitation genre was in its neon Hollywood heyday. At the time, mainstream audiences packed theaters for director John Hughes’ coming-of-age classics like Pretty in Pink and 16 Candles, but Mills’ tastes skew a little more sinister and tawdry, toward titles like 1986’s Reform School Girls (starring B-movie siren Sybil Danning, with an odd appearance from Plasmatics’ lead singer Wendy O. Williams) or high school grindhouse thriller The Slumber Party Massacre, directed in 1982 by Amy Holden Jones. So, when Mills decided to revive Adult Time’s ‘80s-centric Girlcore label, which hasn’t seen a release since 2020, she thought it might be the perfect opportunity to do a big all-star, all-girl feature with a conversion therapy twist. “One of the very first original series that [Adult Time] developed was Girlcore and that series was honestly kind of my ultimate dream lesbian series,” Mills explained, “and it had been a few years since I had done the Girlsway features, which were what I really started doing in this industry when I got into it—so... I wanted to create a series that married the two aspects, like the two things that I most loved as a pop culture vulture myself, I love the ’80s. I’ve always loved the music, the style of films, just like the whole excessiveness of the ‘80s—I’ve always been a big fan of that decade. “And I’m a huge fan of lesbian pulp fiction,” she continued. “I collect the old paperback books and I love how many of the themes you find in lesbian pulp fiction are some of the most popular tropes that people look for today. So, I wanna make a series that takes place aesthetically and inspired-by the 1980s but lifting some of the plots and types of stories that were told in lesbian pulp fiction.” Escape From Camp Conversion wrapped at the end of March and will debut this month on AdultTime.com. The feature stars Octavia Red in the lead role of Jenna, with co-stars Lulu Chu, Alex Coal, Leana Lovings, Freya Parker, Ameena Green, and Selena Ivy as the kidnapped, coerced campers. Charlie Forde, Codi Vore, Cami Strella, Sophia Locke, and Lexi Luna play the slightly sadistic crew of camp counselors who are determined to scare the stubborn young lesbians straight with a strict regime of religiously-based sexual reprogramming. Mills makes a cameo appearance, as does the movie’s producer and Adult Time brand ambassador Casey Calvert. The power dynamics bred by the cult-like backdrop of a forced detention camp sets the stage for strict BDSM boundaries to be pushed and shameful, sinful scenarios that also involve jealousy, betrayal, and secrets from long ago. Mills, who is able to coax believable theatrical performances from her players, said that while the on-set atmosphere was collaborative and fun, she cautioned cast members to stay in their cliques. “I went in and said, ‘Okay, we have to we have to remember we’re all friends behind the scenes, but there are two cliques in this movie—the campers and the counselors—and I want you all to kind of stick to your own and build that a little bit into the energy that we bring onto the set.’” Shot in several locations scouted by Calvert’s production crew, Mills said what may be the movie’s most memorable sex scene was performed in a yurt. “We found a location that had a big functional, authentic yurt and as soon as I saw that I thought, ‘That’s something you don’t see every day, that’s gonna make a really bizarre space for a ceremony room,’ and it was true. Some of the most intense lesbian sex I have ever filmed has been filmed inside of a yurt. I won’t divulge what, but it was next level.” With such a large cast of characters played by several rising newcomers as well as seasoned stars, Mills had nothing but positive feedback for the actresses. Type-casting sometimes plays into her selection process. “I knew I needed a kind of a quiet, sexy, and beautiful, but also like kind of a tough lead for Jenna and someone who had a quiet confidence about them and I’ve always found that about Octavia. You know she’s a fast-rising star in the industry,” Mills said, “but she’s very humble. She’s very kind low-key, got confidence to her, and I know that she grew up bisexual, very much of a tomboy, very queer, and grew up from a more conservative background—so, I’m like that’s Jenna right there. “Lulu Chu is someone we work with a ton and we love working with them. They’re always just a great actor, always going to give 200 percent and just nail everything from the look to the tone to the dialogue to the scenes, so they were an obvious kind of counterpoint to the confidence of Octavia. I really wanted Lulu in that role and then we need to surround them with kind of an eclectic fun group of campers so I brought in a mix of people I knew really well and also people that I’ve been dying to work with.” Coal has a “tremendous lesbian porn fanbase” Mills pointed out, revealing that it was her first time working with the actress. AT brand ambassador and girl-next-door Lovings was a shoe-in for her part, while campers Parker, Ivy, and Green are rising stars that attracted Mill’s attention for casting. For the counselors, “I kept picturing in my head that they’re like Roald Dahl villains, so, I needed to get a group that I knew was gonna have a lot of fun with that,” Mills said. “Charlie is one of the most underrated performers in the business. She’s a great sex performer, a great actress, and she’s really accomplished behind the scenes as a producer-director. I knew because of her accent and because she’s so poised that she would make a great dictator type of counselor. “Codi, I love—she has this Cheshire Cat-style smile, which is super-cute and sweet, but kind of a little evil and she knows it, and she can definitely play a good domme and kind of a bratty top, so, I knew she would be good as our overly unhinged counselor,” Mills added. The director approached Luna, another AT brand ambassador who usually plays sweet-girl characters and offered her the role of “the most evil villain of all, and she was like, ‘I am down!’ So, that was like a delight to be able to have so much fun,”  Mills said, crediting th actress with giving her character a sinister laugh. Of Strella, she said, “I was really impressed with her from working on some past lesbian projects, and we when we were doing a podcast interview, she actually told me that she had a real-life cult experience, and as soon as she said that, I was like, ‘You know what, I was thinking of doing this movie in the spring...’” Locke, who rounds out the counselors’ quintet, Mills said, “is so talented and she did a fantastic job in this movie—her part it was just a dialogue role, but she nailed it.” Lana Smalls and Scarlett Skies are cast in flashback roles, playing Luna and Locke as young lovers. “They were amazing,” Mills said. “I had no idea that they actually are roommates and good friends in real life—so, it was a good coincidence.” Mills said the feature will release first as a trilogy with episodes dropping in May, June, and July. Then, a full-length, director’s cut will drop in time for awards consideration, with a four-hour run time. A fully edited R-rated version will also be separately released on movie and social media platforms. “it’s not just a hacked software version,” Mills noted. “We legitimately shot this movie so it can be released as an R-rated movie and so we can try to get it out there as much as possible because it’s not just a perfect summer movie.” Emphasizing that, above all, the movie was produced to entertain the audience and appeal to the straight male gaze like most of her work, Mills added, “A lot of the stuff I’ve done in the lesbian space—I like to be able to deliver, at the surface level, on some of the most popular tropes and themes and dynamics that fans look for, but to also have the sort of underbelly. Trojan horse subject matter that is actually quite serious. ‘Conversion Camp’ provides space for us to explore the stories.” Photography by Colette Klein