Director: Erik Bloomquist
Year: 2023
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Witchcraft
Plot:
On the last night of summer camp, a group of counselors decides to play a game supposedly invoking a camp legend of a vicious witch as a joke, but as the night continues they realize the legend has come true and they have released the figure forcing them to stop its plans.
Review:
This was quite an enjoyable genre effort. Among the brighter aspects of this one is the highly inventive and enjoyable setup present here involving the background and lore of the witch at the campsite. Using a fairly routine campfire tale to tell the story, the idea presented here is such that it’s fairly easy to see where the camp legend comes from, the seemingly harmless invocation ritual that follows is quite likable with the resulting freakout that sends everything spiraling out of control. Forced to defend themselves, the ensuing chaos and confusion that erupts over the murders that take place before them sends this into a bizarre series of occurrences featuring the counselors trying to come to terms with the situation while starting to see the advanced signs that something's happening.
That all comes about with the highly effective and impressive means of the witch coming to fulfill its dark plans. As the confines of the curse and its legacy over them come together exceptionally well filling everyone in on the true history of what’s gone on at the camp, there’s an increasingly entertaining series of attacks and confrontations here that pinpoint the growing influence of the witch over the camp by taking over the children who were stranded near the camp or playing with the power supply around the area. This grows into a strong collection of sequences bringing about the witch’s masterplan with the possessed children chasing and stalking them around the camp, the means of trying to stop them, with the whole situation offering a strong enough collection of kills and confrontations. These all provide quite a lot to like with this one.
There are a few issues here to bring it down. The main factor with this one is the unnecessary and overlong running time where everything here runs on quite a bit longer than it should. There’s no reason for this one to go just shy of an hour and forty-five minutes for this kind of story as way too much of the first half is basing itself on the different relationships around the campers and the lead-in to the witch reveal. A lot of this doesn’t need to be as drawn out as it is, and that leads into another big factor as another of the drawbacks involves the subplot of the homosexual camper bullying and picking on the other camper that goes nowhere beyond offering a series of stale confrontations based on outdated ideologies for some problematic factors to look into in the modern age. Otherwise, these are the main factors to be had here.
Overview: ****/5
An immensely fun and entertaining genre effort, this one manages to get a lot to like about it as just a few minor drawbacks bring this one down. Those who appreciate this kind of genre effort or are curious about it will have a lot to like here while only those turned off by these particular types of efforts should heed caution.
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