- Actors: Diego Boneta, Maiara Walsh, Jocelin Donahue, Andrés Velencoso
- Director: Alberto Marini
- Disc Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC, Widescreen
- Language: English
- Region: Region 1
- Number of discs: 1
- Rated: R
- Studio: LIONSGATE
- DVD Release Date: August 2, 2016
- Run Time: 84 minutes
Summer Camp is a mostly unoriginal
infection/zombie film, with a title that sounds like a slasher from the 1980s.
What little within Summer Camp that
is original ends up mostly just confused rather than effective, making this
film equal parts derivative and illogical. The result is either frustrating or
hilarious, depending on your patience level and viewing state of mind. Either
way, even the mildest of entertainment offered by Summer Camp is likely to wear off long before the brief 84-minute
run-time begins to feel like an eternity.
The basic
premise of Summer Camp has four
American counselors traveling to a castle in Spain to prepare for a camp. Not
only is their need to travel to a different continent in order to work in a camp
never properly explained, the setting of the castle is completely contradictory
to the premise of the movie. There is also no staff to help them with the
logistics of housing and feeding a group of kids, and these counselors seem to
spend all of their time doing pointlessly dangerous teambuilding exercises in
the surrounding woods. If you expect a movie that takes place during a summer
camp, you will be surprised to find that the children don’t even arrive until
the last few moments of the film.
Despite some
creepy red herrings suggesting a killer lurking nearby, the real danger arrives
in the form of an infection. The origins of the disease and how it spreads
remain a pointless mystery with plenty of misdirection along the way, but the
basic effects remain the same as most zombie narratives. One distinguishing
factor is the temporariness of the infection, though this leads to more
illogical behavior than clever sequences. Horror movie characters don’t all
need to be geniuses, but these four characters are so stupid that their
inability to escape the danger eventually becomes comical.
This is Italian
director Alberto Marini’s first feature film, though he has had a rather
successful career as a screenwriter and story supervisor thus far. This is why
it is so shocking to find that the screenplay is one of the weakest elements of
Summer Camp. Though, this is not to
say that the rest is fantastic. The acting is passable, mostly just with
consideration of what they had to work with. The look of the film itself is
often extremely dark, and when the cinematography isn’t poorly lit, it often
employs shaky camera movement to hide the lack of choreography in the action
and missing dramatic stakes in the narrative. And the nearly non-existent
special effects are enough to disappoint even the truly dedicated genre fans.
The DVD release
comes with a Digital HD copy of the film, but there are no extras on the disc
itself.
Entertainment Value:
3.5/10
Quality of
Filmmaking: 4/10
Historical
Significance: 2/10
Special Features: 2/10
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