Slaughter at Camp Groundhog

Camp Slaughter (2004/2005)
Directed by Alex Pucci
Screenplay by Draven Gonzalez

If you find yourself nostalgic for old school summer camp slasher fun, then this film is literally right up your sick and twisted alley. The only shame is that this film isn't actually set on Groundhog Day with the killer dressing up in a groundhog costume and gnawing people to death. That would have been an awesome twist.

Daniel, a nice looking jerk from the past...Kyle Lupo (Teenage Dirtbag, The Frightening)
Jen, an annoying girl from the present....Anika C. McFall (He Who Finds a Wife, He Who Finds a Wife 2: Thou Shall Not Covet; Nora’s Hair Salon 3: Shear Disaster) Her next film will probably be He Who Finds a Wife 3: The Final Finding.
Mario, a gay guy from the present....Matt Dallas (Kyle XY) If you were wondering where Kyle XY was just before he did that show, now you know.
Angela, a sad girl from the present who looks like a young Carrie Fisher....Joanna Suhl (If you were wondering who Joanna Suhl was and what she has ever been in, now you know.)
Rueben, a mute (or so he would have you believe)....Miles Davis (You thought he was dead, but he’s back and ready to play some cool jazz) Miles Davis looks so young and healthy (and white) in this film that I could hardly believe he was already dead for nearly 14 years when it was made. If you’re a fan of jazz music you absolutely have to see this movie.
Vade, a mostly dumb goomba from the present....Eric McIntire (One Tree Hill) One Tree Hill is sort of like Nepal. I know that it exists, but I’ve never been there.
Ivan....Jon Fleming (Will & Grace, Dante’s Cove, Frat House Massacre) Apparently this film was cast out of a male modeling agency.
Michelle, a big girl who likes to make weapons...Bethany Taylor (Frat House Massacre, Survival Camp) Planning on doing a film where young people are being slaughtered in a cabin? Not without Bethany Taylor, you’re not.
Paul Marq....Brendan Bradley (Video Game Reunion, Elevator, The Legend of Neil)
Lou, an alcoholic handyman....Jim Marlow aka Jim Hazelton (I’m not sure what kind of scheme involves doing a film like this under and assumed name, but I’m going to assume that it has to do with cheating on taxes or child support.)
Elizabeth....Jessica Sonneborn (A Lure: Teen Fight Club, Agua Caliente, Bloody Bloody Bible Camp)
Nichole....Ashley Gomes
Patrick....Ikaika Kahoano (Supergator, Making the Band) I think it’s some sort of new rule that reality show people have to do horror films.
Tommy....Troy Andersen (Survival Camp)
Jay...Philip Jess
Valerie...Galen Allis
Joey/Cassio....Matthew Catanzano
Drowning Boy...Brain Cobb (I know this name is probably a typo or yet another attempt to evade taxes or arrest warrants, but I will admit to spending some time hoping that there is someone out there named Brain Cobb.)
Tobe/Rodrigo....Joshua Finn
Daxx/Iago....Justin Fortune-Creed
Linda....Amanda Gallagher
Mark...Jesse Curtis
Ian....Silas Hagerty
Paul....Ben Hills
Tina....Kate Jurkiewicz
Wesley....Kyle Langan
Billy....Adam Maganzini
Ben....Jason Morris
David....Lacy Ponsart (This is someone who should consider changing his name to Brain Cobb.)
Nikki....Autumn Sacramone
Laura......Jillian Swanson (Killer Campout, Killer Pickton, Diary of a Cannibal, The Raven, The Tomb)
Kevin/Othello....Gustavo Taveras (The good news is that you get to play Othello. The bad news is that it’s a play within a play in a slasher movie.)

Usually when an old movie is remade or an old series rebooted there is an element of nostalgia involved in the project that harkens back to the time of the original. At least, you’d think so. But in modern business terms the only nostalgia is for the money that the original raked in. The result of this process is that most of the time these new stories suffer from a serious lack of intellectual parentage. What I mean by this is that something like the latest Friday the 13th remake is disconnected from the past because it is a conscious rewriting of the ideas of the past and at the same time even the nominal connection with an artifact from the past takes away from its ability to break new ground in the present. And nominal is the key word here, because most of the time these remakes really don’t get what was so damn special about the original. I pick on Friday the 13th particularly here because the latest remake went out of its way to piss on the one thing that was key to the original: the summer camp.

Summer camps are perfect for all kinds of stories because they represent a liminal space and time. They are associated both with the innocence of childhood and the adolescent acquisition of life experiences and the journey into adulthood. They’re also dark, smelly and bug-infested and sometimes run and staffed by psychopaths, sociopaths and just plain strange people. At least, this is my understanding of summer camps since I was never sent off to a real all-summer extravaganza like these camps. But then, in my corner of Texas summer was similar to a summer camp minus the idiots in matching t-shirts too busy having sex with each other to stop kids from drowning.
See, the whole idea of summer camps has become a mythological territory informed as much by fiction as by any actual experiences. At least for me, because my summers were closer to Stand By Me than Friday the 13th.

This is where Camp Slaughter comes in. It is the kind of film a Friday the 13th reboot should have been. It is quite literally an exercise in nostalgia because it takes a group of friends from the present and strands them in a camp that is caught forever in a time loop of the day before and the day of an old-school slasher massacre in 1981. Yes, I just spoiled the big twist for you. But here’s the thing, if I hadn’t been wading through a stack of slasher films for pure research I wouldn’t have stumbled upon this film. And if I didn’t know to expect something more interesting than “slasher kills teens at a camp” I wouldn’t be interested in seeing this film. Whereas if you tell me that this is “group of friends wander into a camp that is stuck in a time loop where slasher kills teens at a camp” then suddenly there’s something more interesting to the premise. Having lived through 1981 I can assure you that there’s nothing cool about the idea of being stuck in 2 days of 1981 forever even if you’re not being hunted and killed at a summer camp.

But a film where the central premise is that some unsuspecting young folks stumble upon a camp stuck in a repetitive time vortex? That’s a great premise for a story. If this had been the premise of that hockey-puck shaped turd of a Friday the 13th remake then it might have been sheer genius. Instead we got a hockey-puck shaped turd of a film on one hand and a small film with an interesting premise. Corporate group-think and L.A. screenwriting gurus have effectively killed interesting stories. Thanks for that. Try some mustard flavored sow urine with that hockey-puck shaped turd that you call a film.

But it’s not like Camp Slaughter is anything more than imperfectly executed film with a decent premise.
In fact, that about describes the film in a nutshell.

The film begins with a scene of slaughter from the original night of death and then credits roll and suddenly we’re following some crazy kids in a Hummer entering Maine (Welcome to Maine: The way life should be). You’ve got your asshole goomba driver, the sad girl (wonder what her dark secret is?), the sassy black girl in the Jamaican knit cap and matching bra and the guy who is asleep.

We’re lost.
VADE: Please. I know these roads like the back of my dick.
I’m curious as to what his definition of the “dick back” is. Does he mean the underside of his dick? Is it that much more dumb to say "I know these roads like the underside of my dick?"

Suddenly it’s night and they’re stuck on the road to Camp Hiawatha and some mysterious force is flinging mud at their windshield and suddenly everyone is freaking out, except for the sleeping guy. Sad girl sees blood and dead people and there’s the obligatory “cell phones are not working” moment that has become a paramount device for the suspension of disbelief in the contemporary horror film. (Seriously, why not just have the cell phones work but have them constantly being routed to a lazy dispatcher who just doesn’t bother sending help.)
Suddenly it’s morning and the gang of four is discovered by the denizens of Camp Hiawatha who are confused by the military vehicle and the strange fashions of the modern kids.

Are you guys from Europe?

And then we’re introduced to the mannish girl who has been Camp Hiawatha’s archery champ for the last two years. She even makes her own arrows. This is what we call a clumsy bit of early exposition to make you either distrust her expertise in weapon making (she likes arrows, thus she must be a killer) or expect her to be a key component of the rescue squad (she makes arrows, thus she can save them from the killer). Meanwhile there’s a guy back in the kitchen of the camp cutting up meat ominously and we notice that the cars in the parking lot are an old pickup truck, an old station wagon and an old Buick or Olds. Meanwhile a crying kid eating a candy bar alone in the woods without a shirt on is killed by someone who just reaches around the tree and chokes him to death. This is the first of many reasons that you can say that this film suffers from a good concept poorly executed. The laughability factor in this death--well, I guess it would be more tolerable if it was went even further over the top and then at least it would be really laughable. Incidentally, dying in the woods with chocolate smeared all over your face and chest really doesn’t look good, because chances are pretty good that nobody stumbling onto your corpse will think that you were eating chocolate.

The next death is the traditional make-out death. In this case the guy hears something (sounded like an arrow zooming by to me) sees nothing and starts kissing the girl without noticing that she’s just lying there with her eyes frozen in space, blood trickling out of her mouth and, oh yeah, an arrow sticking of the side of her neck. I don’t know what kind of roofie swilling camp girls he’s been used to making out with, but you’d think a person would notice when they’re dealing with the dead or nearly dead. Of course, the fact that she died quietly with an arrow to the neck (which considering the fact that she was almost completely prone when she was hit would require a shot from almost ground level--a feat of bizarre supernatural skill) is also hard to believe unless the arrow somehow got penetrated all the way to the brain in that shot. Still, not even a bit of twitching? The guy runs away only to find his head caught between a tree trunk and a strap that is progressively tightened until his head breaks.

In the cabins Mario and Vade figure out that the camp is stuck in 1981. (Thanks to Time magazine and Brooke Shields.)

MARIO: Dude, you haven’t noticed anything?
VADE: It’s fucked up.
MARIO: That’s it?
VADE: It’s Maine. What do you expect?

Meanwhile the 1981 gang is working on a production of Othello. I wish I could see a deeper significance to that choice, but there probably isn’t one. Though I think it would be a brilliant idea if someone did a production of Othello where the citizens of Venice were putting on a play about a slasher who kills people at a summer camp.

Then we get a fugue-like reprse of the make-out deaths with a new annoying couple who die while having sex.

HIM: I haven’t cum yet. Are you going to let me finish?
HER: Tough shit. I came.

Ah, young summer camp love. This joyful reverie is interrupted when the girl realizes she has some sort of multiple pronged thing coming out of her belly. This means that she would have had to have taken a pitchfork to the back that got all the way through her spinal column before she died. On the other hand her body weight (she’s not that big) and the couple of inches of pitchfork sticking out front from her seem to be sufficient to kill the guy she was riding simply by slumping over on him. (I know, sometimes it’s best to ignore the ridiculous physics of horror films, but I’d be willing to go along with it if I thought the point was that it was supposed to be completely ridiculous.)

As people discover more bodies the killers (yes, there are more than one) go on a full scale stabbing spree. One of my favorite images is that of a large bowie knife coming down for another stab and it is shiny and clean even though it isn’t even the first stab on this victim.
Does the knife have some auto-clean function to keep it fresh between stabs?

Eventually we get a whole lot of exposition piled on to us just before Angela gets an arrow in the heart. The gist of the story is that some counselors drowned a kid, and then some other kids killed some people and then once he realized that they were stuck in an unending loop exposition guy took it upon himself to make the killers pay by hunting them. It’s really convoluted and not very well set up for us along the way, so I almost appreciated the explainosaurus showing up to tell us what happened. Apparently the four real killers can escape the loop but only if they can sucker in four replacements. Jen manages to drive away in the Hummer but you already have a bad feeling that some of these camp killers are on the loose in the present. Fast forward to a now successful author Jen getting an email from the camp killers and that’s our ending.

So, like I said, an interesting premise shoddily executed with some groaning bad acting and some writing that would make Pat Sajak cringe. I’d like to see someone else take this premise and do something good with it.

Special Features
1. Camp Daze: Behind the Scenes, Directed by Matthew Geiger
I do love behind the scenes bits for horror films and this one is especially fun because the behind the scenes bit uses the original title for the film. I don’t know what the point of the title change was, but if it was because.
I like the notion behind Alex Pucci’s mission statement for ScreamKings. It’s a good idea to take classic horror premises and give them a twist. So, even if I didn’t completely buy this shot, I’m willing to give them another shot, because I’d rather see more interesting misses than a lot of high budget mediocrities. (I’m looking at you, Michael Bay.)
2. Behind the F/X, Directed by Matthew Geiger
Combined with the previous bit this provides some interesting technical effect information.
Matt Corrigan’s recipe for blood: Karo syrup, chocolate syrup, red food coloring and a little blue or green or yellow food coloring for different shades.
3. Extended Scenes
Billy’s Murder
The opening sequence extension involves the girl unbuttoning Billy’s jeans and reaching into the pants to which he responds with “Slow down” which doesn’t make any sense until he says “I need to take a whiz first.” Ah, now that makes sense. The extended death for Billy kills him off by strangling him with a rope while he’s in midstream. I wish this had been in the final cut.
Welcome Sequence
The extended version of our introduction to Camp Hiawatha is a nice addition.
Porch
This is a badly written and awkwardly acted scene. Good cut.
Bow & Arrow
An even lengthier sequence of the explainosaurus telling the story of Camp Hiawatha at the end. I actually like the extra information.
4. Deleted Scenes
Outside the Theater
This is a clunkier version of the time trap discovery as the contemporary group figures out they're stuck in 1981.
The actors look like every line they say can be replaced with “I’m speaking exposition.” Scenes like this are included so that you can stop complaining about the bad acting and writing in the final cut of the movie when you see how much worse this deleted scene is.
Cafeteria Doors
This is a bit of extra suspense with a bunch of cringing people holed up in the cafeteria. The one bit of interesting exposition reveals the reason for this expedition on the part of the contemporary group as Jen tells Angela “The next time you decide to get an abortion just give me the coat hanger.” Jeepers. Considering the fact that the character who utters this line is the only one of the contemporary group to make it back to the future. Wow, that is an unsympathetic survivor. Jeepers, indeed.
Dead Boys Cabin
An extra bit of mayhem and bloody discovery in the boys cabin.
Dead Girls Cabin
See above. Not much special, but I don’t see why you couldn’t have cut it into the film. It’s not like you would have lost anything in the pacing.
5. Why We Hate LA Actors
Sure, it’s a Hollywood actor in a hot tub with two girls getting a neck rub and complaining about New Englanders using the adjective “wicked” but then “wicked” is a dumb adjective so he’s got a point. This bit would be even more funny if it turned out to be real. Then it would be wicked funny.
6. Jesse’s Girl
Yes, it’s a video of people behind the scenes goofing around to the tune of "Jesse’s Girl." It’s similar to the scene of the cast of Saving Private Ryan doing the same thing, only that was less awkward.
7. Production Slide Show
It’s like a summer camp yearbook for people who already feel nostalgic for this film. Remember that scene that we were watching half an hour ago? Yeah, good times.
8. Camp Slaughter Trailer
Shortcuts can be deadly
Thanks, voiceover narrator. You’re really helpful.
These kids look happy...but they’re really trapped...
Just like you, if you’re watching this trailer.
...in a twenty-five year time warp. Every day starts with fun, every day ends with lots of blood. Every day the killing starts over.
And you want ME to give you a spoiler alert? How about Every day starts with a cheese plate and every day ends with cat shit, oreos and death?
Welcome to Camp Slaughter. The only way you’ll see home again...is in a box.
And even in a box, you won’t really see home again. Home will see you.