Camp Pleasant Lake has got to be one of the most unpleasant horror films ever made. This is not a good thing, which is a shame since good horror often thrives on the disagreeable. Unfortunately for those who make the (poor) decision to watch this film, you are in for nothing but 90 minutes of pure, incomprehensible drivel. This movie is so bad that it’s almost not even worth discussing further.
Writer/director Thomas Walton’s abomination starts like so many horror films. A couple of dudes are driving in a car when they come across someone pulled off on the side of the road. Do they get out to help? Do they dare? Of course they do. And, unsurprisingly, within a few short seconds of talking to the seemingly harmless woman, one of the guys ends up getting axed. However, before the bloodshed, we manage to find out that a horror-themed camp (if you can call it that) has opened up down the road, where a lot of people have paid a lot of money — $10,000 per person, which is honestly astounding once you see what the camp actually entails — to attend. The camp’s schtick is that it recreates a grisly kidnapping and double murder that happened many years ago. If this sounds absolutely inhumane, that is because it absolutely is. It’s basically the equivalent of opening a horror-themed excursion in Jeffrey Dahmer’s old apartment in which people can pay to experience the terror of his victims. Totally unhinged.
The story goes that years ago, a young girl named Echo (Lacey Burdine and Kelly Lynn Reiter) and her brother Jasper (William Delesk and Jonathan Lipnicki of Stuart Little fame) attended a Halloween camp while their parents spent the weekend going through couples counseling. However, the kids at the camp are absolute little shits who bully Echo over her (admittedly stupid) costume. In her sadness, she runs off with some random dude who her family met at a diner they’d stopped at on the way to the camp (this is a whole other thing that needs to be discussed because, wow) and is never seen again. But that’s not all! The parents also happened to be brutally murdered, leaving Jasper to fend for himself. Now, people believe that Echo still stalks the woods, and because this movie is more predictable than fire being hot, these rumors are absolutely true.
Sometimes B-horror films are fun. Their low budgets and bad acting give way to quotable cult classics. But that is not the case with Camp Pleasant Lake. The majority of the actors in this movie behave as if they’ve never seen a movie, let alone a horror one, in their entire lives. The film’s concept of a “horror-themed camp” feels more like a horror-themed Fyre Festival minus the sad ass cheese sandwiches. When the guests get mad that they paid $10,000 (again, $10,000!!!) to see some gore, the camp owners desperately try to salvage a bad situation. Lucky for them, a mysterious murderer is killing off their workers one by one! The only thing is, no one realizes these murders are actually … gasp … real! This gag goes on for entirely too long, so that when someone finally figures out that they really did just see a dude’s throat get slit for real real, you’re entirely too bored to even care.
What makes this movie so offensively terrible is the filmmakers’ supreme lack of interest in making even the basic setup plausible or compelling. The characters who presumably paid the big bucks ($10,000, I swear! These people didn’t even get gift bags or t-shirts for that amount of money!) to attend this camp look like the absolute last people you would ever expect to find indulging in horror-themed events. It’s true that horror fans come in all shapes and sizes, but this crowd looks more like they accidentally missed the boat for an upcoming Carnival Cruise than people who willingly decided to attend an event focused on the literal traumas of real-life people. This is a problem since it immediately renders the premise of the film completely unbelievable. The acting often goes above and beyond, as well, with characters flying into weird, unbridled rages that are most likely meant to be seen as menacing or scary. In reality, though, they just come off as examples of what happens when you snort bath salts for fun.
There is so much tonal dissonance in this film that it becomes totally unwatchable after a point. Nothing is surprising to the viewer, and it’s obvious from the very first scene who the real killers are. Basically, the story is the sort of movie you expect a seventh-grader to turn in for her English class. The only difference is that it might actually be more interesting to read that seventh-grader’s story than it is to watch this film. Camp Pleasant Lake is a movie that makes you realize that it’s actually truly hard to, well, make a movie. Not just anyone can do it. These people certainly can’t.
Photo courtesy of Deskpop Entertainment
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