Golf News

Mini-golf chain with nightclub vibe from London to open in Addison

Celebrating a win at the demanding sport of miniature golf.

Courtesy of Puttshack

A fancy new mini-golf venue with food and drink is coming to Dallas: Puttshack, described as an upscale, tech-infused mini golf experience with global food and drink, will open a location at the increasingly buzzy Village on the Parkway, at 5100 Belt Line Rd. in Addison.

According to a release, it'll be the second in Texas and is opening in Summer 2023.

UPDATE 12-5-2023: Puttshack is opening on December 6, 2023. This 32,000 square foot venue is home to four 9-hole putt putt courses as well as the Challenge Hole experience, an Addison exclusive. The menu features sharable dishes and a full-service bar with cocktails, mocktails, and locally-brewed beer.
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The Addison location will be a two-story space, with four tech-driven mini golf courses, and a high-energy, upscale nightclub vibe.

Puttshack was founded in London where it has four locations, and uses a high-tech system for scoring, promising that they've "thrown out the old rules, paper scorecards, and pencils." Aren't the little pencils and paper scorecards part of the fun?

They've since opened two locations in the U.S., in Atlanta and Chicago in 2021, and more locations are opening this summer in Boston, Miami, Denver, Houston, Scottsdale, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Nashville. All of your sortof second-tier cities.

Their website has tips on "how-to-play" — see, this is the other problem with dispensing with the pencils and scorecards, is that you need a how-to on putt-putt — with screens that guide you through the game. You put your ball on a black circle, and wait for a green light to give it a putt.

Each ball is imbued with its owner profile, so the ball can be tracked. To combat cheating. You know how people get with putt-putt.

There are nine holes in each game, and games are estimated to last 30 minutes.

The "nightclub vibe" seems to consist of neon-ish lights, versus the wilting sunlight atmosphere of an outdoor putt-putt place. It's also totally allowed to drink during play, with tables at each hole to set your drink.

The menu consists of eclectic shareable and street-food dishes such as lamb skewers, poutine, crab dip, shiitake mushroom potsticker, meatballs, charcuterie, flatbreads, salads, burgers, and sandwiches including a Hatch chile cheeseburger and an “Atlanta hot” sandwich which you can get with chicken or mushroom. There are lots of vegan options.

Their CMO is Susan Walmesley, who was previously VP Sales and Marketing at Dallas-based Topgolf. A little entertainment-golf-world poaching. She calls Dallas "a key market" for Puttshack, while the company's Global CFO & UK President Logan Powell promises that the Dallas location will be a unique, high-energy space with multiple floors and brand-new features.

"We are excited to welcome Puttshack and bring a novel mini golf experience as the first of several exciting changes coming to Village at the Parkway," says Jason Jones, Manager of VOP Partners, LLC, the owners of the center, in a statement. "Puttshack will be an ideal complement to our growing roster of premium retailers and deliver a one-of-a-kind entertainment and dining option to the Addison community and greater Dallas metropolitan area."

openings

Movie Review

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma gives horror a surreal twist

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing with it a new subgenre - the slasher - that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death - a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask - may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference - Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard - to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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