Review: Don’t Expect to Find Plausibility at Camp Dread

Camp Dread does a number of things that detract from taking it seriously in any way. The main detractor is the plot in general. From a far, it sounds fun enough. But when you get into the real meat of the story, things start getting whacky. The group of kids are actually a bunch of post-teen youngsters who have opted to going to the camp instead of jail as a form of therapy. Because that happens. Julian Barrett (Eric Roberts) is the director of the original Summer Camp genre films and he is using the “therapy” as a pitch for a reality TV show. This far-fetched reality doesn’t end there. Not only are these kids at summer camp and being recorded, but they are also competing for money-based on a game where fake killers invade the camp and fake kill the fake counselors until the last one standing gets the million bucks.

So, there’s that.

Not only does the story suffer from plot holes and some questionable writing, but the amount of characters is just too staggering for something with this small of a production size. The viewer loses track of people, never connects with anyone, and ends up not caring either way when a character dies. When it comes down to it, I don’t know what is more fun to laugh at: The writing or the acting which gets on par with Z-list titles like Satan’s Little Helper and Alice in Murderland. (Yes, I have seen both of those movies.) [Editor’s note: Hey, what’s wrong with Satans Little Helper?] 

The entire story is full of plot holes and eyeroll-inducing moments, but this leads to the one bright silver lining: some of the dialogue and acting in this movie is so hilariously bad it could rival even the legendary likes of the infamous line from Shark Attack 3. Plus we do get to see a kid beat to death with his own fake leg and another murdered with a decapitated head shot from a giant slingshot.

Now, in the third act of the movie a small slice of redemption pops up. Some twists and thrills are finally thrown out that manage to land with more impact than anything prior seen and Danielle Harris and Eric Roberts add some talented acting to an otherwise lacking crew.

In the end the kills are too modest, the gore is almost non-existent, the dialogue is ridiculous and the direction is amateur. We even get an overtly obvious red herring killer-who’s-not-the-killer. This is a lot of genre cliches packed into one and half hour’s of patience-thinning substandard horror.  Harrison Smith wrote and directed Camp Dread, along with a handful of other straight-to-DVD affairs and while his heart may be in the right place, it just didn’t translate as well as it could have.