Basically a send-up of Friday The 13th: Part 3, Camp Death is essentially the Airplane of modern underground horror films.
The story finds Camp Crystal Meph re-opened after years of seriously violent deaths of campers. Now, it's been reimagined as a camp for mentally ill adults. We've got everything from psychopaths to sociopaths, as well as some sex maniacs and at least one gender-confused hillbilly. It's a who's-who of crazies, in the most cliche of ways possible.
Dave Peniuk plays Todd Boogjumper, the camp's new head counselor. His uncle Mel, (Darren Andrichuk, who completely steals the show) owns the place, and constantly warns Todd that the experiment is likely to fail in blood-splatteringly-disastrous ways due to the camp's history. Mel's battle with the camp's resident squirrel is reminiscent of Caddyshack - the squirrel even oddly resembles a gopher, but Caddyshack didn't have as much cocaine abuse by the animal puppet as this movie does.
Although the movie has a coherent story (masked killer, stupid counselors - not sure what more there needs to be), it really feels a lot more like a series of individual scenes and one-liners. For the most part, though, it still works, so that's fine I suppose. It's really not much different than a lot of slashers, even of the mainstream. They spend a lot of time designing kills - or in this case, designing gags and jokes - and the common strain of the movie is an afterthought.
The kills are a spectacle in and of themselves - my favorite being death by toaster (with more toast than you've ever seen in your life). My only complaint, really, is that at films of this level, you generally see really bad practical FX, and here, they chose to go with bad CGI FX instead. It works well for the movie, in a Windows 98 graphics, Birdemic kind of way. It's not that it looks fake, so much as it looks so out of place - but I honestly believe it was done on purpose, and it kind of adds to the charm.
I found myself laughing several times throughout the movie, so as far as this being a comedy, it definitely hit its mark. This is my first exposure to anything made by Frame, and it seems a good starting point. The movie has a total of 19(!!!) writers on IMDb, so I can't be sure who contributed what, except to assume that there was a lot of ad-libbing and everyone basically created their own characters during the shoot. I commend the entire cast and crew, as everyone really came across as bat-shit crazy, in the most hilarious ways possible.
If you find yourself in need of a goofy, bloodsoaked movie to complete your life, you can do a lot worse than to find yourself at Camp Crystal Meph watching Camp Death III in 2D!
Watch the Trailer:
