Camp Pleasant Lake review
Camp Pleasant Lake is intended to a throwback slasher horror flick. It’s not of the Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th variety. It’s more of a Flag Day, Bad Dream on Oak Street on July 18th.
The genre doesn’t have to be this hard to get right. Low-budget, indie horror films can be just as thrilling and compelling as their big studio-backed counterparts. To succeed, they just need a captivating hook, decent death scene effects and performers who can elevate the material. Camp Pleasant Lake is lacking on all of those fronts.
Director/writer Thomas Walton helpfully lets viewers know the quality of his slasher almost immediately. Between hyper editing, CGI marijuana smoke and an underwhelming initial kill, the film doesn’t get any better.
The Rutherfords (Michael Paré and Maritza Brikisak) purchase an old campground infamous for the disappearance of a young girl, Echo (Lacey Burdine) two decades ago. To make some easy money, the Rutherfords host a Haunted Halloween Weekend where patrons can get scared and experience some cheap thrills.
Naturally, most of the camp’s staff are campers who harassed young Echo and her little brother, Jasper (William Delesk). It doesn’t take long to work up viable candidates for the killer who’s wearing the mask Echo brought to camp way before her disappearance. Maybe Walton didn’t feel the need to play up a mystery and opted to basically reveal the killer in the opening act?
One of the biggest issues with the film is the performances. Maybe Walton instructed them to overact, emphasize the wrong word from the dialogue and generally perform like they’re in a bad high school drama. These exaggerated performances just completely ruin the experience.
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It’s so hard to take a horror movie remotely serious when the cast seems fully incapable of delivering even competent performances. This goes for genre vets like Bonnie Aarons (The Nun), Robert LaSardo and Jonathan Lipnicki (yep, the kid from Jerry Maguire all grown up).
Some of the blame is due to the crowdfunding effort, which allowed backers to be part of Camp Pleasant Lake complete with speaking lines and death scenes. While that’s cool for the backers, it’s not great for the audience watching non-actors try their hand at something approximating acting.
Walton tries to insert some irony where the patrons and camp staff happily line up to get killed by the smiley killer. This isn’t as clever as Walton envisioned as the victims come off like idiots. It never seems to occur to any of them that their fellow patrons shouldn’t be bleeding.
They’re not in on “the gag” so if they’re taking knife strikes to the gut and throat, the blood spewing out isn’t from some hidden blood pack. At least the death scenes are largely well-staged with solid practical effects.
The creepy music proves ineffective and ill-timed. Editing also quickly becomes frustrating with choppy, intentionally jarring transitions from one scene to the next.
Camp Pleasant Lake is an uncomfortable viewing experience that squanders its interesting slasher premise on shaky performances and clueless characters.
Rating: 2 out of 10
Photo Credit: DeskPop