Camp Blood 2 is the long awaited horror sequel to 1999’s Camp Blood. And by “Awaited” I mean 3 people were vaguely interested in seeing more of the “CBU” (camp blood universe) AND BY “Long” I mean about 6-8 months. Thats because Camp Blood 2 was *technically* being ironed out before the original Camp Blood had even finished filming. With Camp blood getting a release in early mid 2000, They LITERALLY were working on franchising the series before an assembly cut of the original even existed. And that STILL is just…blowing my mind. It does kind of make you think what kind of people were working on this film when they already had a “Multi film” roadmap on the cards before the first was even finished…

Anyway! Given my original thoughts on “Camp Blood” were that I thought it was (in my opinion) a reletively boring watch with poor technical ability, WAY too much padding and a chronic case of the “In References” I didnt exactly have the highest hopes for “Camp Blood 2”. Frankly given how low the bar was set with the original “Camp Blood” One did find ones self wondering how it could POSSIBLY get any worse. Well; What we have here with “Camp Blood 2” is a film that, in some regards is actually a bit better than the original, but in some regards is actually quite a bit worse.

The plot of the film is Astoundingly simplistic and about as generic as they come for a post 90’s horror film. Taking a page out of the Scream franchise the film picks up about 12 months after the events of the original Camp Blood, Trisha is still in an insane asylum after the events of the first movie where her and her friends went on a camping trip and ended up on the receiving end of a killer clown from folk legend. Trisha was able to reveal the killer to be non other than their woodland guide “Harris” however, when the cops turned up they could only find a ton of dead bodies and Trisha covered in blood holding a clown mask and the murder weapon.

The original film left it a little bit open ended as to whether Trisha was the only survivor of Harris or whether she was actually the killer and had had some kind of mental breakdown. But the sequel opens making it EXTREMELY clear that Trisha was not the killer in the first movie. Which actually kind of undercuts one of the only okayish things I thought about the first film…

Anyway; a year after the event Trisha is still struggling and has recurring dreams that shes being chased through the woods by the killer clown. Things are about to change pace however when she receives a visitor in the form of Worth Milligan a film maker who’s been researching the events of “Camp Blood” and wants to make a movie of the events with Trisha on board as an executive producer…basically she’ll get to work on the scripts, casting, how events played out. The whole thing. Milligan is FAR from sincere though trying to sell her on the idea of getting involved by citing the success of “The Blair Witch Project” as a reason he wants to make the movie.

Trisha is rightfully concerned that this might just end up being a cheap exploitation style cash in on her friends deaths, so she initially walks away saying she’ll consider it, but after arriving back at her “Cell” she has a flashback to the events of the first movie and decides that working with Millington might actually help her get over her trauma, and…well…anythings got to be better than being trapped for life in someones 1980s livingroom.

So! With that, Trisha requests an meeting with Milligan and heads out to L.A. to meet him while he’s in the process of casting for the movie. And it’s hear that we get the first feelings that things arnt quite as “Professional” as Milligan had promised. For a starters the casting is being held by Milligan and his assistant, whos a chronic alcoholic and is drinking during the casting and doesnt seem to know how to operate the camera used for the casting call.

All female applicants are ogled and when Trisha arrives at the office shes almost immediately jumped on by our alcoholic assistant in a clown mask while holding a machete. Which…given her PTSD for this, was DEFINITELY the worst way they could have opened discussions on her helping with the shoot. In either case these discussions are fairly short, in fact. Thinking about it, I don’t think Trisha ever actually agrees to take part. She just turns up, gets jumped by one of the crew and then is somehow suddenly involved in the movie.

After the ‘Incident’ Trisha asks to step outside to get some air and it’s here she meets Adrian, a young woman here to apply for a role in the movie who has a nice chat with Trisha, gives her her last cigarette before heading inside. Unfortunately; just as shes going in for the casting call, Worth tells her that the films been fully cast and that the last actress in just got the last available role leaving Adrian devastated.

That night however after a full frontal nudity shower (not for this movie…please…) the actress worth hired is mysteriously murdered. So! The next day when the cast get together for introductions and to run through their roles, when that cast member is a no show Worth tells Trisha to go through some mugshots and cast a replacement…well; of course she goes for Adrian. While heading out to go call her though, Trisha is AGAIN attacked by a clown killer. Who chases her all around the casting building until she gets back to the casting room. At which point it’s revealed to be the SAME alcoholic crew member AGAIN. Clearly illustrating that this is a film for people with the memory span of a goldfish.

So with the cast and crew all arranged Worth piles everyone into a mini van and they all head out to the woods to start filming. In a move that…well, it’s pretty baffling. Worth failed to tell the cast or crew that they were actually heading out to film at the ACTUAL site of the camp blood murders. Trisha is naturally quiter triggered at the thought that they’re about to recreate her fiance and friends murders at the site where it actually happened. But Worth says he’s doing this for convenience and authenticity. Why settle for a site thats *like* the place where the murders happened when the ACTUAL place the murders happened is right on their doorstep!

So! They head into the woods, set up. And it doesnt take long for mysterious happenings to…happen. People start disappearing, the actors begin to feel uncomfortable around Trisha who may or may not be responsible for the disappearances and tensions begin to rise after Milligan threatens to send Trisha back to the asylum if she doesnt cooperate with his vision of the film. Which; in turn leads to some very exploitative and nasty tensions between him and the cast and crew. As the bodies pile high in the last 15 minutes, Will Trisha get closure for the camp blood murders? Will Worth get to make his movie? And will this movie break the world record for the number of times the previous film will be shown, referenced or basically played back in full!? All this and more will be answered if you watch; Camp blood 2.
And to be honest; the quick caption review for this thing should really start and stop at “This is a great “Value” movie, it’s a terrible sequel.” and what I mean by that is, it’s great value in the sense that if you buy ‘Camp Blood 2’ you don’t need to buy or watch ‘Camp Blood’ because they tell you, beat for beat the FULL plot from beginning to end about 5 or 6 times over and over again across the runtime of this movie. Complete with about 20-30 minutes of flashback clips from the original Camp Blood as well! And the original Camp Blood was only about an hour and 10 long to begin with!

It suffers from similar problems to Silent Night Deadly Night 2 where a not insignificant chunk of the runtime is dedicated to talking about or showing footage from the original film. And while that kind of worked with Silent Night 2 because…”GARBAGE DAY” here? There is NO such eccentricities. Strip away the scenes of people recounting the original movie and the flashback sequences and your left with about 40 minutes of border mind numbing running around and fluffy dialogue designed to pad the film out till its LITERALLY just about long enough to dump on DVD without anyone demanding their money back.

Its just such a generic idea for a script. It genuinely feels like the writer/director saw the opening of Scream 2 where its revealed the events of the first film got made into a movie and went “Hey!…imagine if an ACTUAL killer got onto the set and killed the cast for real!” Like they had an idea for a decent enough 20-30 minute short film that was tied to the original Camp blood. But then realised they couldnt really bolt it onto the original film without it feeling a bit wonky, nor could they release it as a 20-30 minute mini movie without losing the ability to distribute it or make money off it. So they just Crammed a load of footage from the first movie into it and added a few more runaround scenes till it got *just* over the line to sell it as its own movie.

Theres so little here to talk about regarding the script, mainly because so much of this is either people arguing or recycled footage. To the point that there isnt really anything fresh to latch onto in a positive way. There isnt really a solid 3 act structure. Just a series of scenes that feel a bit like “Well…if we have the budget we could maybe try to do this?” happening one after another right up to the end credits…I could split this film into “Before they go to the woods” and “When they get to the woods” but to be honest all that changes in the characters between those two locations is they get more angry when they get to the woods as they realise the movies been missold to them and people start disappearing.

The pacing is all out of whack because we have to keep stopping and starting to talk about points from the first movie, there are TONS of weird plot point moments that don’t really get picked up properly like, how could someone like Worth afford to get Trisha out of an insane asylum to have her advise on the film, while at the same time only being able to afford 2 crew members, one of which is a stoner who threatens to kill everyone and the other being an alcoholic who, on any other plaine of reality would have been off the set for “Inappropriate behaviour” before they’d even left the casting room.

It just feels like someone trying to write what they *think* an audience would accept as a bad movie set…when in reality REAL bad sets involve a LOT more people and get particularly emotionally malicious. Its incredibly annoying to sit through as someone who has been on many bad sets, when you see things like Worth saying and doing stuff that would have resulted in full blown walkouts happening before they’d even loaded tape into the camera.

Theres just, so many little things that are problematic, the fact that theres very little character development. I mean, This was a chance to give Trisha the strong female lead comeback arc that probably would have made this movie ten times more interesting, but instead shes still a mentally collpased individual when the film starts, and shes if anything even worse by the time the film finishes. That wouldnt be so much of a problem if that wasnt EXACTLY how she was in the last movie. It would have at least been interesting to let her change her tone on how she deals with this grief. Im not saying she has to have a “Strong badass female” retribution arc like Laurie Strode of Barbara in the Night of the living dead remake. But just…ANY kind of development beyond “Shes exactly the same as she was in the last movie, but now WAY more jumpy!” would have been nice.

And this is a problem that not only effects Trisha, the rest of the cast don’t grow or develop really either. They’re all quite narcissistic actors who, if anything only get more narcissistic as the film goes on until they’re inevitably bumped off.

Add in an underwhelming ending that tries SO hard to tie itself into the first movie with a reveal that…was SO obvious it hurt, and you’ve just got a terrifically underwhelming script that has a nugget or two of a good idea buried DEEP inside it but is ultimately NOT what this needed to be as a sequel. It needed to take the first film a build on it. It needed to be definitively better, to have shown growth and improvement. As it stands its happy to settle with “More of the same” with a generous helping of self referencing. And in doing that it has rather sealed its fate.

Returning on writing and directing duties for this one is Brad Sykes, I already took a deep dive into his work as part of my review for Camp Blood. But what I will say at this point is that I hadnt realised when I started covering this series that theres actually TWO camp blood 3’s…In 2005 Brad Sykes once again picked up a camera to shoot “Camp Blood 3: Within the Woods” a proposed closing part to a camp blood trilogy that bizarrely…even though its written AND directed by Brad Sykes ISNT considered as an official entry in the “Official” series line. The other is included in my Camp Blood collectors Set and is known as “Camp Blood 3: First Slaughter” released in 2014 written and directed by two people not really associated with ANYTHING to do with the previous movies…I don’t know which one i’ll cover next…first person to tell me in the comments will get their wish granted… See you there.

On the direction front, I will give Brad credit, I feel theres some improvement. It’s only minor, but there is a noticeable “Tightening up” on structure and vision here, we have clear establishing shots of the locations used in places, some sequences appear to have had more thought put to them such as using different filters to differentiate when we’re dealing with the cameras used to shoot this movie and the cameras used to shoot the movie within the movie. Sequences seem a little bit more thought through, not necessarily on shot type but on what Sykes wants to put across in his movie vs what the characters could just…flat out tell us.

That isnt to say though that this is now a “Good” film from a direction standpoint. We still have problems with sequences containing shots that don’t really need to be there, the amount of padding is something a good director would be able to turn into something vaguely meaningful, but here its just lacking that solid hand on steerage, and the cast, while *slightly* better directed than the first film still seem fairly lost. They don’t give confident performances and, while I will give them credit for using their surroundings a bit more here than the last lot, they still don’t really feel all that confident about HOW to go about utilising the set space.

It also doesnt help that this film kind of gets a bit leery in places, now I know a lot of people come to horror for T&A, Im not going to fight that, but there are ways to shoot said T&A to make it look sexy or interesting. To pull your audience in with an allure of titilation. Here it feels less alluring and more “Exhibit A”. I cant show any examples here (for obvious reasons), but theres a shower scene in this movie that goes on WAY longer than i’d have liked and the way Brads decided to shoot the thing REALY made me look around to make sure noone could see me watching this thing. It didnt feel sexy, it felt like I was committing a felony.

The whole thing honestly is a bit of a mixed bag and given that Brad was the writer AND director here I would have thought he would have been able to make a rational and clean cut decision as to whether to leave out scenes from the script that struggled to translate well to the screen. Unfortunately it looks like he shot pretty much beat for beat and even if some things DIDNT work out too great he just powered on regardless and as a result it ends in an uneven film thats, probably a bit better than the first to me in terms of direction…but only just.

As for the cine? Don’t you worry! It’s just as bad as ever. Im not kidding this thing looks EXACTLY like the previous movie only with a slightly higher budget. And when I say “Slightly higher budget” I mean they’ve been able to afford a slightly higher quality clown mask, they’ve replaced poorly made signs with slightly better quality poorly made signs, the titles and credits are bigger and cleaner than the original, and while I will say that the sequences here are a little bit more sturdy when compared to the cine of the original, its also a lot LOT safer than the original.

The original had chases down dirt roads, a couple of fights in a river, and aftershots of people being roasted alive. This movie has NOTHING like that. Its all just sequences of people wandering around the woods or backrooms and thats it. Sequences are acceptable, with basic cuts and transitions covering things off without being too offensive. And while in some regards safer sequences reduce the risk of things not quite working or worse going horribly wrong, the downside of playing it safe is that safe sequences…are REALLY bloody boring.

Now I will give them credit here where credits due, there are at least a couple of sequences where they use coloured lighting which…I mean, its here for no particular reason, but i’ll give it to them. Thats a step up from the low/no lighting they had in the first film. And the effects shots here got a REAL big boost you actually get some pretty nice gore shots here that are handled within the cine and sequences rather well! In fact I’d go as far as to say the gore scenes in Camp Blood 2 ARE the best thing about camp blood 2!

That is however somewhat deminished by the same recurring issues that plagued the first film, shots arnt levelled off and are regularly wonky, the edits either cut too soon or too late which can pull you out of the moment, there a weird ghosting effect that plagues a lot of the footage and no consideration was given to sun placement meaning some shots have a great big bright fucker in the background that doesnt half make the shot look ugly. And as if matters couldnt get any worse…remember in my original Camp blood review when I said some shots had this weird trim running around the edge of the frame? Like it looked like the camera was in a camera bag looking through a translucent window or something? well..THE BAGS FUCKING BACK! I thought it was an error that was missed when they made the first film! But NOPE! Apparently it was intentional as they sure as shit don’t bother to fix that issue in part 2! I just…Im at a loss with this thing.

Performance wise…Jennifer Ritchkoff as Trisha is the best performer here. If im being honest…she isnt great. But she has a more than decent bash at playing a scream queen. A bash I think she does acceptably. Given she now has a history thanks to the first film I feel it gives her the scope here to at least work with whats established rather than clinging to existing horror stereotypes like she did in the last film. That being said though Im still trying to decide if I think her performance has gotten better since the last movie or whether all the other cast being slightly WORSE than the last bunch has just kind of…made her more presentable.

Because my GOD the rest of the cast in this thing are insufferable. My main criticism from the last batch of cast members were they were a little too reliant on the horror character archetypes and their performances were just above porn acting…how I long for for those days. As we now have characters who are playing to “typical actor” stereotypes and we’re just…full on into porn level acting. Lines are delivered completely unbelievably, quite often with almost no feeling and even the more interesting sequences or scenes where revelations happen are played down SO much as to be almost muted. Its a bad lot. And the only good thing I can really say is, at least the padding and clips from the first film offer as a distraction from the shoddy acting on display here…in my opinion at least.

And finally; the soundtrack. And if my ears don’t decieve me. I am…99.9% sure that this is just the original camp blood score re-run over this movie. There may be 1 or 2 new tracks in the mix to help give a sense of distinction. But, im pretty convinced they literally just recycled the previous films score and shoved it onto this thing. So given that I wasnt impressed with it when it was used for the first time in the original “Camp Blood” I sure as hell don’t like it now that they’re being so cheap that they’re just reusing the old score over again.

Equally; as an aside too, they didnt bother to get any atmos recordings for the locations they shot at, meaning the set audio veers WILDELY all over the place. Generally when you shoot a movie you get “Room tone” (basically 5 minutes or so of the rooms natural silence) so that you have better control over actor dialogue and other sounds in post…they didnt bother. So this film jumps all over the place going from loud to almost muted with no balancing on background OR foreground noise. Its just a total mess.

Camp Blood 2 was released on VHS and DVD by Spectrum films in the US in the year 2000, it would also later recieve a DVD release in the UK in 2002 by Film 2000, it would have a couple of releases over the 2000’s in various “Multi film” packs typically alongside the original Camp Blood. It was released as a drive in double feature Bluray alongside “Camp Blood” with a 3d conversion of all things from Sterling Entertainment in 2011.this same disc would ultimately end up in the “Complete camp blood” collection which is the version I own as of 2021. And you’ll be totally unsurprised to hear that the version included on this set is basically the DVD version dumped onto a bluray disc complete with tape faults and sound drop outs present in the original DVD release.

Im not even sure if this has been upscaled. It looks pixellated and murky and just..not particularly great at all, theres no extras barring a load of trailers for other movies that the distribution company have shot in 3d…some boutique labels release their movies with a certain reverence. Y’know. They’ll treat these physical releases as a kind of shrine to the films existence. There’ll be commentaries, documentaries, trailers, making of’s all kinds of things that make you think “Oh wow! This film has a living breathing history behind it!” this release has more adverts for 3d conversion technology on it than it does extras about the movies included on this release…I just…I have NO idea what they were thinking with this set. Its a poor presentation…

Ultimately; if you liked camp blood and wanted more of the same. Here it is! It’s barely a movie honestly and stops just short of basically being a clip show. The only capacity with which I can recommend Camp Blood 2 is that it’ll save you time on watching the original Camp Blood. AND theres some slightly decent effects shots in this, which the first one didnt really have. Other than that it’s a tired. BORING movie that wasted 75 minutes of my time, and one I wholeheartedly recommend you avoid alongside the original. It did almost nothing but jerk itself off over how great it thought the first movie was and that seldom makes for an enjoyable time… Don’t get me wrong! If I want to watch a camp blood movie, this will be the one I watch. But in many ways…thats the problem.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/camp-blood-2/