Blast from the Past Movie Review: Camp Nowhere (1994)

Once upon a time, I was a student at Tommy Cho Karate in East Cobb. In addition to biweekly classes and birthdays, Mr. Cho occasionally had sleepover parties where we watched movies. One movie I remember watching is Camp Nowhere, featuring Christopher Lloyd, Kate Mulgrew (better known from Star Trek Voyager), Jessica Alba in a minor role, and a bunch of other child actors I've never heard of. Well, the good old Myopia: Defend Your Childhood podcast gave me the chance to revisit this film, as it has many others.

Here's the podcast. And now for the review...

The Plot

Morris "Mud" Himmel (Jonathan Jackson) and his friend Zach Dell (Andrew Keegan) are going to be sent off yet again for the whole summer to camps they hate--in Mud's case a computer camp and Zach's case military-style camp owing to his poor behavior. Meanwhile, their female friends Gaby Nowicki (Melody Kay) and Trish Prescott (Marnette Patterson) are in the same predicament, with fat camp for Gaby despite her not being fat and acting camp for Trish (and a completely different camp for her sister) so her parents can take a nice long vacation.

Mud devises a scheme to create a fake summer camp where they can do what they want, and they enlist a down-on-his-luck actor and former teacher at their school Dennis Van Welker (Christopher Lloyd) to pull it off. Things go pretty well until the kids' antics attract the attention of local doctors and law enforcement and the parents decide to visit the camp to see what their little darlings have been up to.

The Good

*Christopher Lloyd shows off his comedic acting talents as the down-on-his-luck actor Van Welker. He's always a joy to watch. The montage of him pretending to be the counselor for an acting camp, a computer, camp, a fat camp, and a military camp in order to sell the different kids' parents on the scheme is pretty amusing, as is a close encounter of the worst kind between him and a car wash. Pure, as TVTropes would put it, Refuge in Audacity. And amazing facial expressions.

*There's a bit of, as TVTropes would put it, Reality Ensues when one of the kids is injured and requires medical attention. Let's be realistic...a bunch of middle-schoolers trying to pull something like this would run into all sorts of problems. There's also homesickness, boredom, and what constituents do their leaders when things go poorly in the short run.

*Per the almighty TVTropes, all of the major characters have arcs--Mud and Zach learn to be responsible (and Mud abandons his self-loathing for being a "geek"), Gaby lays off the junk food, and Trish mellows out. Mud's arc is the most obvious, which makes sense since he's the main character. And although TVTropes doesn't point this out, I noticed that Van Welker has an arc as well. He starts out basically as this slacker who's blackmailed into this by a bunch of middle schoolers and uses the whole situation as an excuse to live in a cabin by the lake and flirt with the local doctor, but partway through he starts to remember he was a teacher (albeit one with rather poor judgement--seriously, trying to stage a middle-school musical version of Silence of the Lambs?) and he does have responsibilities to the kids. All these arcs in turn tie in with the ending of the film.

*The film can be read as a criticism of over-scheduling kids in favor of more free play. The various camps the kids' parents want them to go to tend to be super-focused on particular activities (computers, acting) rather than simply letting kids have fun over the summer. The links I posted above contain various articles written from all ends of the political/cultural/moral spectrum criticizing society's tendency to over-schedule kids and in favor of more unstructured imaginative play. Obviously kids need to be supervised to some degree so they don't kill themselves, but free range kids were the norm up until relatively recently and the world has only gotten more safe since then. Alternatively, as Nick and Thomas pointed out in the podcast, one could read this an endorsement of providing at least some structure for kids--they grow bored with endless free play and ultimately have more fun with more organized activities in the later part of the film. One could argue both elements are in play--as the ancient Greeks said, "moderation in all things."

*Zach is clearly a case of, as the Bible would put it, bad company corrupting good character. The movie starts out with him pretending to bully Mud in order to maintain his "reputation" with a bunch of juvenile delinquent friends. Another character even points this out pretty early in the film.

*There are some good middle-school humor jokes, like one of the bullies becoming only effective after having experienced a growth spurt.

*Ironically enough, when the parents come to visit, the kids have to do a lot of the stuff they were supposed to do anyway to fool them--putting on dramatic productions, conducting military drills, etc. That was pretty funny.

The Bad

*Although Gaby is being sent off to fat camp when she doesn't need it and Trish is just being sent away so her parents can go on a prolonged vacation rather than spend time with her and her sister, Mud and Zach are rather disrespectful to their parents, especially Zach. In his case, military camp might be necessary to teach him discipline, although one might argue that his father's excessive strictness is exacerbating his son's troublemaking (by provoking his rebellious tendencies) rather than solving it.

*Although Mud is clever enough to come up with the scheme, he looks like he's 11 or 12. His dialogue comes off as something someone far older and wittier would say.

*It was my understanding that Gaby wasn't actually overweight and her parents (in particular her mother) were erroneously convinced otherwise. The actress certainly isn't. However, her character arc involves her ditching junk food and Mud discusses how someday she'll lose weight and become attractive. That kind of mixed messaging could be a problem given the prevalence of eating disorders and even girls of normal body sizes thinking they're "fat." TL;DR She's not fat, and the movie is not being especially responsible for conceding even the possibility she is.

*The characters are all 12-13. Just how interested in the opposite sex are they going to be? Perhaps I was a late bloomer, but although I'd outgrown the "girls are icky" early-elementary idiocy, I wasn't really interested in girls in the romantic sense until a little later in middle school. I'm pretty there was a Simpsons episode involving a "valley girl" trying to organize a school dance and nobody was really into it, with Lisa being the voice of reason. Yet Mud and Zach have have romantic subplots and in the side of one shot we see two kids making out. They're not high schoolers, yet they seem to act like them.

*This isn't really a knock against the film's quality, but the movie works best for a pre-Internet age. A few minutes of Googling would have blown the scheme up right away unless Van Welker was a skilled web developer and had a bunch of fake Yelp accounts too--in which case, he probably wouldn't be working at a cheese shop in the mall and hiding from the repo man.

*The movie kind of drags in the middle. Would've been better if they'd tightened it up a little.

The Verdict

Entertaining but flawed. 7.5 out of 10.

Movie Review: I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER (2016)

The evening of the first day of DragonCon 2016, I had the opportunity to see a screening of mystery-horror film I Am Not A Serial Killer, with Dan Wells, author of the novel on which it was based, answering questions before and after the show. The panel discussion will be its in own blog post; now it's time for the review...

The Plot

Teenage John Wayne Cleaver (Max Records) works in a funeral home, has a fascination with serial killers, and has recently been diagnosed as a clinical sociopath. To prevent himself from harming others, he lives by a strict series of rules. However, a serial killer has begun stalking his small Midwestern town and Cleaver may have to break his rules to defeat him...especially since the killer isn't human.

The Good

*The film has some extremely creepy and suspenseful scenes. Even though I knew the general outlines of what was going to happen, there are many scenes where you fear just what Cleaver or his seemingly-benign elderly neighbor Mr. Crowley (Christopher Lloyd) are going to do.

*The film has a lot of really good dialogue, including Cleaver's Crowning Moment of Awesome from the book where he terrifies the oafish high school bully at a Halloween dance. Records delivers the lines with what another review I read describes as aggressive cheerfulness in a sequence that drew laughter, applause, or a combination thereof from the audience. Cleaver's reaction to catching his mother at dinner with his therapist Dr. Neblin (Karl Geary) is pretty funny too, as is Neblin's reaction to his comments. The confrontation between Cleaver and the killer in a chapel just before the film rolls to its violent conclusion is also well-done.

*Geary and Lloyd deliver the best performances in the film. Neblin is extremely witty and obviously cares very much for Cleaver, while Lloyd lets the occasional flash of creepiness or rage shine through Crowley's kindly old neighbor persona, setting up something much worse to come.

*There are lots of interesting character moments. Although Brooke (Lucy Lawton) plays a smaller role than I remember her playing in the book, the friendliness and kindness that marked her character are still made clear in a couple scenes. Crowley displays some interesting depths--in one scene he quotes William Blake's poem "The Tiger" to reveal what in hindsight is self-loathing.

*The filmmakers do a good job showing rather than telling Crowley's love for his wife, which is an extremely important motivator for his character.

*I noticed the film looked kind of old-fashioned in terms of the coloration, how things appeared on the screen, etc. It turns out it was shot entirely on 16mm film, film that is no longer made but the filmmakers kept cooled in their garage for years. Wells said they were going for an "old, gritty-looking" feel and in that they succeeded.

*The violence in the film is sudden and brutal rather than stylized. This is much more like real-life violence than movie violence.

*Per my comment above, the scene where the killer's true identity--and true nature--is revealed is very well-done. John's reaction is also done well.

The Bad

*The movie was rather slow-moving. That was my single biggest problem with the movie. I remember checking my watch multiple times, which is my main indicator of whether a film is entertaining or not.

*It's not clear why Cleaver decides to interfere with the killer's activities at all, although when he does decide to, the movie does make it clear why he chooses to challenge Crowley personally. It's been many years since I've read the book, but the book jacket suggests he's doing to protect his family and the town--he's fighting "a menace to everything and everyone he would love, if only he could." Although he doesn't have an emotional connection with anybody, he knows he should and is acting accordingly. Yes, Cleaver is a psychopath, but instead of thinking nothing is wrong with him, he knows he's damaged and wants to be better.

*Records delivers some of Cleaver's snarky dialogue really well, but I never got a creepy incipient psycho-killer vibe from him. In the book there's a scene where he discusses with Dr. Neblin trapping and torturing prairie dogs in a way that comes off like he's discussing playing with Legos. That illustrates just how warped he is, but didn't make it into the movie. He does watch Brooke and her family through a window early on, but the creepiness in that scene was too subtle. I expected someone far more intense and overtly unsettling. The closest we get to that early on is a scene where he has to restrain himself from attacking a trio of bullies, but that could have easily been him trying to avoid escalating a situation into a fight he can't win, not checking murderous tendencies.

*At one point Cleaver catches the killer in the act, but the killer frightens him away rather than immediately attack him as well. Wells said during the panel that in the novel it was explicitly stated he was too weak to kill Cleaver and finish what he was doing with the corpse at the same time and the film let the reader draw that conclusion. However, I didn't get that, which is why I had to ask in the first place.

*The final confrontation between Cleaver and the killer is rather underwhelming.

The Verdict

A rather minimalist film, but still creepy and suspenseful. 8.5 out of 10.