Title: Camp Pleasant Lake
MPAA Rating: Not Yet Rated
Director: Thomas Walton
Starring: Jonathan Lipnicki, Bonnie Aarons
Runtime: 1 hr 30 mins
What It Is: A group of campers gather together for the horror experience of a lifetime. They get a little more than they bargained for when a masked killer starts running around and starts butchering them.
What We Think: I will preface this by saying to some degree, I expect slashers to not be high class cinema by any means. I am a fan of Friday the 13th, I love objectively bad horror films if they’re fun. Unfortunately, this is not a fun movie.
Oh. My god. Pain. Owowow. Trying to find good things to say about this film is hard. This was a hard watch. Syfy channel hard. Tubi original movie hard. I’ve seen YouTube videos that were better horror movies.This had to be one of my most painful watches I’ve ever done for FilmSnobs.
I think the film says it best when a bunch of campers start calling the camp they’re at “Camp Naptime.”Script? Incomprehensible and convoluted. Acting? …Community theater bad. This movie is not good. That is not the charm of it, either. This is not so bad it’s good. Just bad. Story wise? Think too hard and it all falls apart really quick. The dialogue is completely nonsensical. And plot structure? There is no plot structure. When I say the acting was community theater bad, I mean I would not be surprised if all the actors were from a local community theater. The direction made them all act like space aliens with dialogue so abysmal you’d think a thirteen year old wrote it. I’ve honestly seen better acting in local car dealership commercials. No shining stars here, unfortunately. I am not usually this hard on a movie, but damn, this movie was an absolute dumpster fire. I really struggled to find redeemable features of this film, luckily there were some.
The redeemable features of this one are some of the gore effects and how cool the killer’s mask looks. Whoever was behind the practical effects for the gore did a decent job and whoever designed the mask (though the story behind it is a little hard to believe) did an awesome job. Just wish they did those things for a better movie. I hope they got paid well and in the future get to work on films of better caliber.
Our Grade: F, to this movie’s credit, it is really rare I give a movie this low of a grade.I do not like giving indie films this low a grade, but I also wouldn’t be doing my job if I told you, the reader, that this was in any way a good film. It’s really not. I don’t recommend any horror fan watch this unless it’s a drinking game with friends. Even then, save the drinks for something more fun. This movie made Friday The 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan and A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5: The Dream Child look like cinema. When you make Jason Takes Manhattan, as in the movie where Jason Voorhees melts into a child, look good…you have done something horribly, horribly wrong.