Campfire Stories Review - The Best Kind of Bad
Format Reviewed: DVD
Directors: Bob Cea, Andrzej Krakowski, Jeff Mazzola
Starring: Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Charlie Day, David Johansen, Perez Hilton (Mario Lavanderia), Rob McElhenney
Distributor: Velocity Home Entertainment
Release: October 1st, 2001
Genre: Supernatural Horror
Rating: R
Running Time: 95 minutes
Budget: ?
Box Office: ?
Two teens on their way to a backwoods party come across a beautiful young woman having car trouble. Their search for help only gets them lost, deep in the woods, where they meet Forest Ranger Bill with a penchant for scary stories. The campfire flickers long into the night as the ranger uses words to weave his tapestry of terror, filling their young minds with a host of horrific images that will be burned into their consciousnesses long after the fire's last embers have gone out. Insane doctors, Indian ghosts, bad drugs, a deranged handyman with shiny new shears - all that and more awaits anyone brave enough to stay until sunrise... if you live that long!
This movie is a bit of a fever dream.
While browsing the local library for a book to check out, I noticed they had a significant section of movies on DVD and Blu-ray and decided to scan the shelves.
Nothing really caught my eye until I reached the final four-foot section and discovered this absolute masterpiece waiting for me.
The synopsis above is what's presented on the back of the box and I immediately knew what I was getting - hot garbage.
I was surprised by the cast list, particularly Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney. I would later learn that the duo met while making this film so technically, It's Always Sunny fans can thank this movie for the show's existence.
This movie is extremely low budget. Like, to the degree that they recycle shots over and over again to pad out the runtime because they didn't think to record more shots for a scene.
For example, in one scene, someone is being stabbed repeatedly but it is clearly just the same shot looping over and over to a god-awful song yelling "THIS IS MY PERSONAL HELL!" over and over again. In another scene, the same bright overhead lights swing around the camera lens enough times to make you frustrated and cover your eyes from how bright it is.
While this may sound terrible, and it absolutely is, it's also my favorite kind of bad.
This movie looks like something a bunch of friends got together to shoot in the woods one weekend while they were able to borrow someone's dad's camcorder and it rocks.
Yet they somehow got the budget for some WILD CGI for the time. A scene involving a Native American seeing spirit animals made me laugh so hard I was physically throwing my hands up and cheering "YES!" because it was so ridiculous yet the CGI looked impressive for the time at the same time.
It's also very poorly documented. While trying to research anything else about this movie I found that it is super hard to find any real and verifiable information about it. It doesn't even have a Wikipedia page!
The only thing more surprising than that is the fact that near the end of the film, the entirety of Michael Graves' Misfits make an appearance while playing a show and I suddenly realized that the universe wanted me to pick this movie off the shelf because it's exactly my type of shit.
Campfire Stories is terrible.
Everything about it is so amateur and loose but it's undeniably punk rock in how little it cares and just shoots for the moon.
This team used the budget they had, if anything, and made the best product they could while having a good time doing it.
This is the definition of a good bad movie and I will sing its praises forever.