Movie Review: ‘HAPPY CAMP

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Back in the Summer of ’99, a new kind of horror film was released. It put you through the eyes of three young white people as they attempted to uncover a secret evil in the woods. I refer of course to The Blair Witch Project, a movie that broke all the rules and invented a new kind of horror film… found footage.

Alright, so maybe it wasn’t the first of it’s kind and maybe it wasn’t super original, but it made a shit ton of money, meaning it would inspire piss poor imitators for decades to come.

One such piss poor imitator is Happy Camp.

From executive producer Drew Barrymore (seriously) comes a “story” of Happy Camp, California, a small backwoods community known for their bizarrely high missing persons rate. According to the film, over six hundred people have disappeared from this sleepy town. According to a quick Google search, that number is a lie. The credits list names of disappeared people from the town. After a little more research, I find that these are names of people who donated to the failed Indiegogo campaign (it made less than half it’s intended goal).

The movie opens with a small amount of promise. There are on camera interviews with people whose lives have been affected by the disappearance of loved ones interspersed with authentic looking news broadcasts. The people they hired to do this look authentic enough too. If you told me that the toothless bearded hick they hired was in fact a toothless bearded hick who just wandered out of his meth hazed trailer and onto camera, I’d believe you. For a second I thought I was watching a genuine documentary, then the “characters” come in and start “acting”

The plot concerns a girl named Anne who is making a documentary about her boyfriend Michael going back to Happy Camp to confront the mystery of his brother’s vanishing. Tagging along are their friends Teddy and Josh. I had to look these names up on IMDb because they were so damn unmemorable that I forgot who they were after I was done watching. As they embark on their journey in their run down RV, we’re treated to the obligatory “White people having fun” montage. We just get snippets of them playing pranks and joking around before getting to the serious stuff. Why does this even exist? Not just here, but I see it in a lot of found footage movies. There’s always a useless moment of levity before the horror stuff to breathe life into the generic characters, but the problem is that the pranks they pull is just as generic as they are. It’s just white people talking about sex and beer.

Anyway, end of rant.

The RV gets a flat tire (because of course it does) and this causes an needless amount of friction between the gang. Honestly half of the movie is everyone yelling at each other and not working together at all. After about an hour of nothingness, the movie decides finally add a horror element by having a yeti kill everyone and then, pffft, the end.

Seriously, the movie is an hour and fifteen minutes, and until the yeti shows up at the seventy minute mark, there’s not one mention of anything supernatural.

The performances are flat, the story is non-existent, the characters are generic as all hell, and the ending is one of the biggest Deus Ex Machina cop outs I’ve ever seen. Part of me wished they took a wrong turn at Camp Crystal Lake and have Jason Voorhees sort things out. Then it would actually be interesting.

Gravitas Ventures will release HAPPY CAMP on VOD and across all other digital platforms on Tuesday, March 25.