Director Harrison Smith’s “Camp Dread” is a mixture of “My Little Eye” and “Friday the 13th.” In fact, go watch those movies instead. In all seriousness, “Camp Dread” has a pretty clever premise, it just has absolutely nothing to do with it. It’s a straight faced slasher film set in a summer camp and barely uses the opportunity to reference the “Friday the 13th” films, and yet it takes full advantage with Danielle Harris as the local sheriff. Her character’s brother is named Michael, and she hates horror movies. You see, it’s opposite. It’s clever because it’s opposite!
Either go for the tongue in cheek slasher nods or don’t. You have Danielle Harris, a summer camp, and Felissa Rose co-starring. What a humongous missed opportunity. “Camp Dread” centers on a group of delinquents, criminals and thugs, that have been recruited to star in a very edgy reality show. Eric Roberts is charming and slimy as Julian Barrett, an old film producer who still wants to continue his hit horror movie series, but is settling for this reality show. Danielle Harris only shows up for book end sequences, allowing for a drawn out prologue of clunky exposition.
There’s also a final appearance that seems injected just to put off conscious viewers from thinking “Whatever happened to the sheriff? Why didn’t she ever show up to check on the show?” The group of mentally unbalanced psychos roam around the camp just doing nothing but swimming, and playing sports, and arguing. The film goes for about thirty minutes with literally nothing happen, and all semblance of sub-plots completely fall apart by the finale. There’s a lot of potential within the premise involving a reality show with mentally unstable criminals and a producer desperate for a hit, but “Camp Dread” is so boring. Even for a ninety minute movie, it demands a lot from the audience while offering absolutely nothing on screen.
There are a few vicious kills followed by long stretches of filler and padding. And when director Smith finally runs out of excuses to draw tension that fail to arouse suspense, he outright reveals the killer of the film, and goes for broke by painting the screen red with dodgy special effects, boring chase sequences, and a finale that leaves way too many holes open to be remotely logical. There isn’t a single stand out character beyond Roberts present, and I really would have loved more explanation as to what Barrett planned to do with the footage when all was said and done. In either case, “Camp Dread” lays the groundwork for a unique thriller, but only comes up generic and tedious.