Camp Blood 4 (2016)

If you have stumbled over this review you might want to check my look at the Camp Blood Franchise by starting at the beginning with Camp Blood. Click here to start things off right. 

Okay this is Camp Blood 4 though it is the fifth movie in the franchise. If you want to try and understand this read my previous review for Camp Blood First Slaughter. I don’t really want to try and explain it again. If you haven’t seen First Slaughter yet don’t worry you will hear all about it in this review.

The movie kicks off with a four minute long recap of what happened in the previous Camp Blood movie. Then we get opening credits that are painfully slow with names hovering onscreen far longer than need be. That kills another four minutes. Eight minutes in and we still haven’t met our new characters yet. We do finally meet our main character and watch her get out of bed. Then she brushes her teeth and hair and watches a news show that never ends. She finally shuts off the television and goes for a walk, stops in a store, and browses the shelves and then leaves for more walking. There is a good fifteen minutes of nothing but this without any dialogue or character interaction! What the hell am I watching?

Eventually we do meet the other characters and begin to get some dialogue, which makes me miss the silence that we had before. Though when people aren’t talking, we get some generic rock music blaring because that is what independent filmmakers like to do. There are more flashbacks as one of the characters tells the story of Camp Blood, which means we get to watch the kills from Camp Blood First Slaughter in another eight minutes of reused footage. With about thirty minutes left they finally get to the woods where we get more walking and talking. All the kills are in the last eighteen minutes and by then I didn’t care. Oh, and the movie doesn’t end because we get a “To Be Continued” on the screen.

Shopping for movies... thrilling

I’ve seen movies that have a lot of padding, but Camp Blood 4 takes the cake. Seriously most of the seventy-three minutes is either flashbacks, walking, shopping, brushing, and other inane stuff that isn’t supposed to be in your movie. There is literally fifteen minutes of original material, and I use that term hesitantly. The killer and the kills are all lifted out of the previous movies and executed poorly. The mask looks terrible, we know who the killer is, and they use too much terrible CGI. These effects would have looked bad in the late nineties much less twenty years later.

This is just a horrible movie. It is certainly the biggest waste of time I’ve seen so far in the Camp Blood franchise and that is saying something. I’ve been watching and reviewing horror movies for over thirty years and this might be the worst excuse for a movie that I’ve ever seen. If you have read my stuff here at the website you know that I tend not to say things like this… but it’s that bad. I’m going to soldier on and check out Camp Blood 5 which I think is supposed to complete the “story” this one started. I don’t want to, but damn it I’ve started these movies and I need to finish them.

Let me suffering thru this nonsense mean something and please skip this movie. Hell skip this franchise all together. If you have already watched Camp Blood 4 then you have my sympathy and we have a shared experience, a horrible one.

Next up Camp Blood 5

 

© Copyright 2021 John Shatzer

Camp Blood First Slaughter (2014)

If you have stumbled over this review you might want to check my look at the Camp Blood Franchise by starting at the beginning with Camp Blood. Click here to start things off right. 

Before I begin this review for the fourth installment of the Camp Blood series, I need to do some explaining. While this is the fourth movie in the Camp Blood franchise it isn’t Camp Blood 4. That is the next one which is actually the fifth entry into the series. That might be because Camp Blood 3 was originally titled Within the Woods, though it mentions the first two films and has the same killer. That might be why in some places this is Camp Blood 3 instead of Camp Blood First Slaughter and in other places is Camp Blood 4. Though again it is neither. Also, with the name Camp Blood First Slaughter you might think it is a prequel. It isn’t because it mentions that first three movies, including the one that wasn’t initially called Camp Blood because it is in fact a Camp Blood movie. Make sense? Yeah, I’m confused as well. Now onto the review.

After a couple of precredit kills, which I suppose are now a tradition despite having a new director and writer, we get the credits. Oh, and I guess that you should also know that a new killer in a different mask kills the clown after he has killed the couple that was taken out before the credits. I’m guessing that the clown isn’t the killer in this movie. We then meet a bunch of college students taking a course in Urban Legends. They watch some found footage of a couple being killed by the clown and are sent by their professor to prove or disprove the legend of the killer clown. Who we know is dead… Plus I’m thinking that most institutions of higher education would frown upon sending students into an active crime scene. But what do I know?

The big twist is the students walk into the woods and then we abruptly see all their death scenes. Then a title page that tells us it is six months later and that they found some cameras and are going to show us the footage. This shitty movie just became a shitty found footage movie midstream. Damn it! All the bad stuff you get in a found footage movie happens including attacks that you can’t see and camera work that is nausea inducing. Finally, we find out who the killer is and honestly, I didn’t care. I was just happy it was over.

Our new killer... I miss the clown

So much for my hope that Mark Polonia would be able to make a better Camp Blood movie. It was going well until the found footage crap kicked in and then it all went downhill. The pacing slows way down, and we get a lot over very boring bits of people walking around and talking. The kills are a bit of an improvement over those in Camp Blood 3, but there is also a ton of CGI including the terrible blood splatter that has been the bane of newer low budget movies. Of the thirteen kills I’d say that the machete thru the head was the best. This is a practical effect that has a bit of a CGI assist with it so that might explain why it is my favorite. There is also a severed head and an axe to the chest that are decent.

I will give the script some credit for tying into the first three movies. So far all of the Camp Blood flicks have done a decent job worldbuilding and making things fit. I mean they still aren’t very good, but I give them an “A” for the effort. Though I was annoyed that they seemingly gender swapped the original killer. If you are going to pay attention to the history of the franchise, I expect it to be carried thru until the end. The reveal of the killer was predictable and yet again they chose a female. Which has also been a pattern for these flicks. Oh yeah, the killer is the college professor who assigned them the homework that sent them in the woods. She has a connection to the original crimes that they explain. Again I appreciate trying to connect each entry with the one that came before it.

This is better than the previous movie but that isn’t a high bar to clear. Despite being a fan of Mark Polonia I’m going to have to recommend passing on this one. I hope that the next one is better.

Next up Camp Blood 4

Ó Copyright 2021 John Shatzer

Camp Blood 3 (aka. Within the Woods) (2005)

If you have stumbled over this review you might want to check my look at the Camp Blood Franchise by starting at the beginning with Camp Blood. Click here to start things off right. 

The Camp Blood marathon continues. It took them five years to make another entry in the franchise. This time things kick off with a couple making out in the woods… wait a minute this is how they all start off. Anyways someone is creeping on them and that someone is the clown who shows up and kills them both. Roll the opening credits.

There is a sleazy producer who wants to shoot a reality show at Camp Blood. He offers five people the chance to spend the night there for his new show called Within the Woods. In addition to being a reference to the short film that spawned Evil Dead this also references the movie within the movie from Camp Blood 2. Anyone left in the morning gets to split one million bucks. He has the place covered in cameras and has a stuntman there to wear the mask and scare the hell out of the contestants. Of course, the “real” clown is also there and after making short work of the producer’s assistant and the stuntman starts to take out contestants. This leads to some more running around in the woods with a clown showing up now and again to knock someone off.

This is the third time around for writer/director Brad Sykes and I’m very disappointed. You basically made the same damn movie three times in a row and they have gotten progressively worse. Not only does the script have the same plot holes as previous entries. Like who killed the couple before the opening credits when it is revealed that the killer was one of the contestants and this took place before the show? They did the same damn thing is Camp Blood 2! Plus, how do you keep making the same mistakes in pacing. This movie is every bit as padded as the earlier flicks. Though at least it isn’t filled with flashbacks like Camp Blood 2. Still if you are going to write the same movie three times, I’d like to think you would get better at it. Sadly, that wasn’t the case.

It just isn’t the writing that hasn’t improved or gotten worse. I’m not sure if they were using bad equipment but there are some serious issues with the cameras. Mainly they must have had a couple of them because one has this odd frame that cuts off the image around the edges. It is very obvious when

they switch back and forth between them and after a while it got annoying. There are also a couple of different scenes where the boom mic is obviously in the screen. They never had this issue before so what the hell happened here? Did you not have a good crew this time around?

The kills and special effects are also a huge downgrade. A lot of the kills are offscreen with a body covered in some red goop dropping into frame. You do get a severed hand, which we have seen them do before. Hell, it might be the same prop… The only good gag is an eye getting poked out with a stick. Even that isn’t as good as some of the stuff we saw in the first two movies.

As a viewer I expect a low budget filmmaker to get better as they make more movies. Here Sykes makes more mistakes and brings way less to the project than he did previously. I can say that I’ve not checked out his other work and I know that he has continued to make movies. I’m not in any hurry to check them out. But then again, I was never interested in the Camp Blood movies and I’m watching them now. My advice is skip Camp Blood 3. It is a bad movie and a waste of time.

Next up Camp Blood First Slaughter

 

Ó Copyright 2021 John Shatzer

Camp Blood 2: The Revenge (2000)

If you have stumbled over this review you might want to check my look at the Camp Blood Franchise by starting at the beginning with Camp Blood. Click here to start things off right. 

Did I mention in my last review that there are eleven of these Camp Blood movies? Well, I’m back for more. The first movie didn’t thrill me but damn it I’m not a quitter. Let us see what this one has to offer.

The movie starts off with a random couple walking in the woods. They meet up with the killer clown and are dispatched quickly. Then we get the credits and see a director talking to our only survivor from part one, Tricia, who is still locked up. He is trying to convince her to work on his movie to show her side of the story. If you don’t remember she was the only survivor of the first movie and by the time that one rolled the end credits she was locked up because everyone thought she killed her friends.

We then sit thru a casting call, a read thru, and general preproduction on the movie. I kid you not we get to see all this “thrilling” stuff onscreen! There are also a ton of flashbacks here, so we get to watch part of the original Camp Blood all over again. That is a reoccurring theme as they clearly used the earlier footage as flashbacks to reach the seventy-three-minute runtime. Eventually the clown does show up to kill off the cast and director before the big reveal… which is not at all possible. Let me explain.

The person in the clown costume throughout the movie is clearly a large man. The movie tries to convince us with the big reveal that it was a small woman who was maybe five foot six at most. She doesn’t even fit in the costume with it hanging so loosely off of her that they had to roll the sleeves up. There is also an issue with the story. She drops a bit of dialogue after the reveal that she hadn’t planned on killing anyone but Tricia, but after the first kill decided to kill everyone else as well. That first kill she is referring to is when she offs an actress that has already been cast in the movie so that they will call her in as a replacement. She is very specific about that.

Quick question. Who killed the people before the credits rolled? It clearly couldn’t have been the same person who murdered all of the other characters because she hadn’t killed anyone yet. This was either lazy writing or they needed to pad out the movie to get it long enough to reach feature length. This is important if you are going to get onto store shelves. Add in the flashbacks that use footage from the earlier movie padding things out I’m leaning towards the latter. It is clear to me that they didn’t have enough story to make a feature.

We do get the typical boxes checked for a slasher movie. There is a shower scene and some nudity. The kills are also decent for the low budget. We get a hand hacked off, a machete thru the chest, some throat slashing, a broken bottle to the eyes, and another machete to the head. Though my favorite is when the killer jams the machete thru the mouth of one of the actresses. This is really well done, and the camera lingers on it.

The first Camp Blood movie looked decent for a shot on video production. But this one not so much. The audio is bad with a loud buzzing at parts. I’ve heard this on some other shot on video movies and I tried a couple different sources to see if it was my copy. It wasn’t or maybe they all have the same issue. There is also a weird green halo that I’ve seen in movies shot on some of the lower grade video cameras. All in all, there is a step back in quality to this sequel. Much like the first entry into the Camp Blood franchise I can’t recommend this.

Next up Camp Blood 3 

Ó Copyright 2021 John Shatzer

Camp Blood (1999)

I’ve never seen a Camp Blood movie. In fact, I’ve actively ignored them. But when I found out that there were eleven of the damn things and that some friends of mine have already done a marathon of them, I knew that I had to join in. I mean how bad could they really be? I’ve seen some horrible movies so I’m sure that I can survive these. 

The movie opens with a couple walking thru the woods. She is looking for an elusive bird and he is checking out her butt. They stop and get frisky when a clown shows up and kills them both. Then we meet our main characters. Couples Jay and Nichole as well as Steve and Tricia have decided to go camping. Jay has hired a guide named Harris to take them out in the woods. Before they get to the woods and meet the guide, we are introduced to a couple of hunters who find the lady bird watcher and then are dispatched by the clown. Then we get some scenes of the couples walking to camp, setting up tents and telling ghost stories. They wake up the next morning to find Harris burned up and dead. Lost in the woods without their guide the couples try to get out as the clown stalks them. 

For the briefest of moments, I thought we had a good movie here. Initially the pacing is spot on with the birdwatcher and her boyfriend getting stalked and killed. There is some nudity and gore right away. I was thinking to myself ‘they understand the formula’. But then the Camp Blood goes off the rails. We get a lot of walking and talking to pad things out, which is odd since the movie is only seventy-three minutes long. But they clearly didn’t have enough material to fill out that time, so this is what we get. For a decent stretch of the movie, we don’t have any kills, which for a slasher flick isn’t a good thing. The movie is backloaded with some fun stuff in the last ten minutes or so, but that is ruined by the ending. This is one of those flicks that has an ending, then another ending, and then yet another ending. 

The Killer Clown

Tricia, our final girl, manages to kill the clown by running them over. The car never stops, and she continues to drive down the road to safety. Cool ending… but wait. Suddenly the clown is in the back seat and chokes her out. Bummer ending no one lives… but wait. Tricia wakes up in a mental ward being interviewed by a doctor and detective. So, she must have lived. But they think she killed everyone. Fine Camp Blood has a triple twist… but wait. The doctor, detective, and nurse are played by the same actors that portrayed her friends Jay, Nicole, and Steve. So, is she maybe just delusional? I’d say that they were trying to be overly clever but without all these different endings they wouldn’t have hit that magical seventy-minute mark to sell the movie as a feature. 

The low budget kills are my favorite part of Camp Blood. We get ten kills with the highlights being a machete to the chest, a neck getting snapped, another machete attack to the neck, and a burned-up body. Though my favorite kill is a nicely done machete thru the noggin’. The acting is okay, and the movie is mostly shot during the day. The night scenes around the campfire are poorly light and hard to follow. But nothing much happens during them, so it didn’t bug me too much. 

Camp Blood isn’t a good movie. Neither is it terrible. This falls into the mediocre category which means it is utterly forgettable and a by the number’s slasher flick with pacing issues. I can’t recommend it. 

Next up Camp Blood 2

© Copyright 2021 John Shatzer

The Skull (1965)

The movie kicks off with some gravediggers in a spooky cemetery. Now that is how you start a movie! We see them dig up a grave and remove the head from the corpse inside the coffin. One of them then takes it home, kicks a naked lady out of his bathtub, and then proceeds to remove the flesh from the skull. Not long afterwards he lets out a scream and is dead.

Years later we are with our main cast. Christopher Maitland, played by Peter Cushing, is a scholar of superstition and is at an auction where he is outbid on some statues of demons by good friend Sir Matthew, played by Christopher Lee. Afterwards Maitland is visited by a sketchy fellow that always seems to have things to sell. They make a deal for a book about the infamous Marquis de Sade that is bound in human flesh! The man promises to return the following night with something even more valuable.

As promised, he shows up the night with a skull, the one we saw earlier. It belonged to the Marquis de Sade and is said to have supernatural powers. Maitland is a skeptic not only in the skulls supposed powers but that it even belonged to de Sade. He mentions it to Sir Matthew who admits the skull was stolen from him and that he doesn’t want it back. This intrigues Maitland who starts to pursue it and ends up entangled in all sorts of satanic shenanigans. In the end he comes to believe that the skull is in fact very evil and that it might have been a mistake to acquire the damned thing.

This is a wonderful old school horror flick. The story is paced well and gets right to the action with the graverobbing. Never fear despite the quick start it doesn’t dump the entire plot out for us as we get bits later with flashbacks to fill in the story. I enjoy the fact that we have something spooky and mysterious happening from start to finish. This is the kind of movie where you need to turn the lights down and watch in the dark. Heck we even get Maitland being menaced by some weird Satanists!

Not only does The Skull have a great story it also boasts genre favorites Cushing and Lee. There is also get blink and you will miss them appearances from Michael Gough as the auctioneer and Patrick Wymark as the sketchy dealer of stolen goods. Additionally we get direction from Freddie Francis who did some wonderful horror flicks in the sixties for Amicus, of which this is one. There is a lot of horror cred in front of and behind the camera with The Skull and it shows.

Peter Cushing does a fantastic job in his role. Much of the horror from The Skull comes from its influence on the characters as it tries to twist them into doing terrible things. The last fifteen minutes of the movie is basically Cushing doing battle with it as he fights to not stab his wife to death. He does this with no dialogue using instead his body language and facial expressions to portray the struggle within. Not many actors could convincingly pull this off without it seeming silly or overly dramatic. Cushing nails it. To a lesser extent Lee, who has a very small role here, adds some gravitas to the proceedings as he sets the stage for what the skull can do. Him not wanting anything to do with it is key to telling the part of the story that sets up what is to happen later.

Skull Vision!

The movie is also shot beautifully. The way that they use lighting both an odd and disturbing green light when the skull is active, to the strobing lights used when it is annoyed the movie finds creative ways to let the audience in on when something bad is happening. You also get some neat perspective shots like the hallway full of gas as well a neat use of mirrors to distort what we are seeing. I’m also a fan of the slightly cheesy “skull view” where the camera is placed inside the skull so we can see what it does. This is a visually interesting movie that makes the sort of absurd premise of everyone being afraid of the skull work.

I could go on but don’t feel the need to. This is a wonderful movie that I highly recommend everyone check out. I’m as big of a Hammer fan as the next guy but I’ve always thought of the Amicus flicks as overlooked gems that were on the same level as the more famous studio. Check it out you won’t be disappointed.

 

© Copyright 2021 John Shatzer

 

 

Slither by John Halkin

This is the second book of Halkin’s that I’ve read for review here at the website. Though they share a similar title Slither is unrelated to that earlier book, Slime. The only thing that they share are familiar themes of nature run amok and mankind’s unwillingness to acknowledge a threat right in front of him. In Slime it was killer jellyfish and here with Slither it is killer worms. You know I really do love these Eco Terror books from the seventies.

Our main character is named Matt Parker, a cameraman for television programs. When we first meet him he is in the sewers under London shooting a program and is immediately faced with some strange worm like creatures. Let me take a moment here to clarify the monsters. They are referred to as worms but are really legless lizards or salamander type creatures. Why not just call them snakes you might ask? Well they don’t constrict or inject venom, but are actually the ripping, tearing, and chewing kind of critter. We find that out pretty quick as they attack and tear Matt up pretty well.

The remainder of the book is Matt’s crusade against the worms. He sees the threat as they continue to grow to larger sizes and multiply in numbers. In spite of some horrific things that happen neither his bosses at the T.V. network, nor his family believe him. There is even a line from one of the “experts” where they are called no more dangerous than Ferrets. Clearly this isn’t the case, but will anyone believe him before it is too late? Along the way Matt nearly loses his life, daughter, and spoilers coming… does lose his wife to the worms.

This is a great read. We jump right into the action with Matt’s attack and are then introduced to the other characters establishing the world in which the story is going to take place before getting back to the worms and people being eaten. There are a few sequences where characters are introduced for the sole purpose of being added to the menu. This could be boring, but each death is handled uniquely enough that it never gets old or feels repetitive. Halkin isn’t breaking any new ground here and is telling us a by the numbers monster tale, but he does that very well. As a reader I found myself satisfied with what I got. With that said I also wanted to point out a few things I noticed between this and his earlier book.

While I enjoyed Slime, I had some issues with it that I think are handled much better here. First up the kills in Slither are much nastier and described in gorier detail. This is a creature story and I want them to be both scary and disturbing at the same time. Fingers get gnawed off, guts are spilled, private parts are on the menu, and they aren’t afraid to kill unexpected characters. There are a couple of deaths that I didn’t see coming at all until they were dead on the page. That is a nice bit of writing and made the book a page turner which I finished in a couple of sittings. It would have been one, but I did have to get up for work the next morning.

The characters are more likeable here as well, especially the women. In the previous book Halkin spent a lot of time seemingly going out of his way to make the characters unpleasant. While Matt isn’t the nicest of guys you do end up rooting for him and his family in the end. He has flaws but I found him to be a decent protagonist for the story and that kept me engaged as the reader. It felt like an us versus the worms mentality which much like my previous point kept me interested in the book.

I’ve been digging these British authored Eco Terror books. Guy N. Smith’s Crab series, James Herbert’s The Fog, and Halkin’s Slime and Slither have all been fun reads. Of the ones I’ve mentioned I’d say this is second only to Herbert’s The Fog. I highly recommend Slither as a nice way to spend an afternoon flipping pages. You won’t be disappointed.

 

© Copyright 2021 John Shatzer