Its been a little while since I treated myself to another slice of ‘Camp Blood’ Honestly after the borderline unwatchable double offering from Dustin Ferguson that preceeds this entry, im kind of amazed I came back for more. But! There about another 10 of these to go, and I got curious…So here we are.

‘Camp Blood 666’ is once again, another ground up reboot of the franchise. At this point, im not sure whether they’re even considering the original film to be canon anymore, or if this is just a completely clean restart. All I know is, they’ve AT LEAST airlocked everything from ‘Camp Blood 2’ onwards. As far as this film is concerned, the first film *might* have happened, but its been a good 10 or so years (at least) since theres been any documented murders at ‘Camp Blood’

Our film this time centers around ‘Betsy’ and her boyfriend ‘Tom’. When Betsy’s dad calls her in the early hours of the morning, concerned that his son (Betsys brother) hasnt returned from a night out, he becomes increasingly concerned that he’s fallen in with a bad crowd. He tells Betsy that he knows hes been spending a lot of time up at ‘Camp Blackwood’ recently, and that (according to the news) theres been a lot of ‘cult’ stuff going on up there…SATANIC ‘cult’ stuff…

Betsy recognises the name almost immediately as ‘Camp Blood’ is infamous as the scene of a mass murder of high school teens many MANY years ago (1999). So she agrees to at least *try* to head over to ‘Camp Blood’ to see if she can find any clues to her Brothers dissapearence.

She heads over to her boyfriend Toms house, and after filling him in on whats happened, the pair head up to the woods and start searching, while up there they find a concrete bunker filled with severed limbs, clothes and blood EVERYWHERE. they take a bloodied shirt and decide to head out, but bump into a forest ranger, who tells them to stop pulling pranks. he wont believe them, so the pair decide to go to the towns sheriffs office, where HE’S super dismissive of them, but out of earshot, he arranges for an officer to be stations up at the woods.

While this is going on, this universes take on the clown killer (a possessed cultist…thats not a spoiler either, they make it clear in the opening 5 minutes that this version of the ‘Clown Killer’ is a former mass murderer called Stan Cunningham who can be ressurected to possses a willing vessle at the cost of a sacrificial offering) is slowly, but surely killing off anyone who happens to appear in the film for more than 3 minutes.

When Betsy and Tom decide to go back to the woods to look for more clues, they find an abandoned tent and a diary belonging to Betsys brother, and the information inside that diary leads the pair to Kara, one of Betsys old school friends and a member of the cult her brother has supposedly joined, who was kicked out some years ago after being shunned by the cultists…and, I cant really talk about much more without spoiling the film…Not that the films complex enough that you wont figure it out in the first 10 minutes whats going on…But hey, thats the fun of watching it I guess.

Basically; going into this one, my expectations were rock bottom. After a string of sub par and basically unwatchable ‘Camp Blood’ sequels, all this film really had to do was tell a basic story for longer than an hour and i’d. be raving over it. and…Well, this film has a ruddy good go at that!

The plot isnt exactly original, but it HAS a plot…which again, given the last 3 movies have been the cinematic equivilent of dumping raw footage in a blender with a half cup of house paint, is actually a pretty big achievement.

Its got a coherent(ish) plot, it paces itself not TOO badly, the three act structure IS in place, has bumpy, but not terrible transitions between the acts, and other than some repetition and slowdown in the second act (which…a LOT of films do suffer from honestly) this thing keeps pretty good timing honestly. It opens giving you enough information to set the rest of the film up, and while it really does flag on that 2nd act, it does manage to pull itself back together enough for a 3rd act that ends about as well as this film could have ended, and even puts a nice little twist at the end that I wasnt 100% expecting. Which again, for most films, that would be the minimum. For a ‘Camp Blood’ movie? its like jumping from the ‘silent’ era, to ‘Talkies’.

Unfortunately; thats kind of where the praise begins and ends for me sadly. As while this film ACTUALLY DOES have the barest minimum to constitute a script and plot, on a technical level it seems to go to the wall pretty hard.

Starting with what I didnt like about the script, the characters are all pretty two dimensional, Everyone who isnt Betsy, Tom or the Clown Killer act incredibly passive and dismissive, to the point where it feels like the director basically told them to just ad lib the scene, but refuse to believe anything the other actors are saying. Betsy and Tom dont get off lightly either, basically SOLELY acting as a mouthpiece for the audience, they dont get much depth or development as characters, and their relationship status is pretty much non existent. theres no chemistry between these characters, they just scream ‘Best friend’ energy from start to finish.

Not helping matters either, the film does fall into repetition pretty quickly early on, with kills that start fairly strong, before just becoming kind of low effort by the end. Theres also a LOT of walking still going on in this film. and while its nowhere NEAR as bad as ‘Camp Blood 4 and 5’ on that front, there was still enough of it that it became pretty clear they had about 45 minutes of plot they needed to stretch out to an hour and a quarter.

To that end, the direction and cine are also pretty problematic, the direction itself again; is probably the strongest seen since Brad Sykes was manning the franchise, but at the same time when you consider that between then and this film we’ve had, what many consider to be Mark Polonias worst film and 2 entries from Dustin Ferguson that might as well have been just one film released twice of 30 somethings walking for 78 minutes…it isnt much praise.

There is a creative vision here, which is good. This isnt an entry relying on a heavy colour grade to give it style and substance…unfortunately the film seemingly had a budget of $50 and a pat on the back to work with, and the results speak for themselves. A film that absolutely appears to be trying to make the best out of a bad situation, that; in reality, succeeds about 20% of the time in ACTUALLY doing something kinda sorta half decent.

The rest of the film? is sloppy, plenty of scenes shot for function over style, often without a stabalizer, with overly basic sequencing in mind. it looks basic and SUPER cheap for a not insignificant chunk of the runtime…again; SOMEHOW it manages to outflank everything thats come before it, but all this has really done is set the standard of how good a ‘Camp Blood’ movie can look from ‘Pretty bloody awful’ to ‘actually not half bad.’

Cine is super shakey, composition is uneven with the camera regularly quickly jolting into the correct framing when the director realised the shot wasnt set up for the cast to move within the frame as instructed. You get the feeling there were a lot of ‘first take, and done’ moments in this…its basic whats here ultimately, but basic for the most part is better than bad. While this film is ACHING for more B-roll (seriously, other than one or two examples, this films wides and mid wides from tail to snout.) it at least appears to be trying to tell a story in a more effective way.

Probably the worst aspect of this film though has to be its edit. Which is…frankly, the worst the series has had so far. To get the positives out of the way up front, the colour grade, I feel, is actually not half bad. it embraces the colours of the location, its slightly oversaturated for the most part. Its nice to see a film have a richer grade after 3 films of washed out, grey grading…But the edit itself? awful. shots cut way too late, or occasionally too early, the pacing of the sequences is all over the place, the thing cuts whenever it wants. The titles and credits on this one are abysmal with static text overlayed onto low res screengrabs from the movie to open the film, and default font text throughout.

That of course doesnt even mention the BIZARRE ‘CG’ (and im reluctant to call it CG, because…realistically its just a 2 frame low res gif of lightning overlayed on to the clown killers face) YES! in this film the clown killer can shoot lightning from his eyes to stun people…I have NO idea why, but the 2-3 times they do it, it makes the film suddenly feel like some kind of failed ‘Tim & Eric’ sketch…it REALLY pulled me out of the action honestly and I felt only cheapened the film further…

The biggest sin this film commits is that it DESPERATELY tries to squeeze every second it can out of this film to hit runtime. To the extent that the credits run for a full 5 minutes or so at half speed. and they even go as far as slowing entire scenes down by 3-4%…Not enough for casual viewers to really notice a difference, but just enough that people who CAN notice that stuff to see they’re trying to squeeze literal seconds onto this things runtime.

Probably the most aggregious example of this is a sequence where Tom is watching TV eating cereal, and they randomly decide to show 3-5 minutes of footage from a show starring the directors mum as a clown, and the director and his sister in the audience as kids…I dont know if this was a pilot for something, if it was a local Public access show, or if it was something more than that…But ‘The Mrs. Clown Show’ takes a not insignificant portion of this films runtime and I had NO idea why it was playing…Not *quite* as bad as the last film deciding to run 15 minutes of Sterline entertainment movies in the middle of the runtime…but still pretty bad.

Performance wise, its a wash. NON of the cast perform anywhere even remotely passing ‘good’ everyone is overly dry, reads their lines with next to no emotion or enthusiasm and for the most part, it feels like everyone is reading their lines as if they’d just seen them in the instant moment the words were leaving their mouths.

They’re stiff, lifeless dont bring any physicality to the role, quite often they’ll just flat out break the 4th wall by deliveirng their lines directly down the barrel of the lens. If I didnt know any better, i’d say these were just the directors friends doing him a favour. Because if these were trained professionals…I’d have questions about their qualifications.

and topping it all off, we have a soundtrack thats 75% recycled music from other Sterling entertainment films (mainly Camp Blood films) and 25% royalty free tracks sourced from ‘free to use’ sites online. its haphazard, randomly dropped in, and for SOME reason a good chunk of the film will have multiple music tracks, just randomly sat on top of one another creating nothing short of an obnoxious din. Where it works, it kind of works…But im really getting fed up of the camp blood music thats been in use now for at least 5 years at this point, and I really hope they shake things up agian with the next film.

‘Camp Blood 666’ is, surprisingly; probably the best entry that Sterling have produced up to this point. Its by no means a brilliant film, but it has a functional script, it more or less knows what it wants to do, even if it doesnt have the budget to fully try to do it, and there are a couple of nice moments here.

I still cant say im absolutely in love with this one, but its probably my favourite Camp Blood Film since Brad Sykes original closer ‘Within the Woods’. I would say this isnt an essential watch, but if you have seen the original ‘Camp Blood’ or ‘Camp Blood 2’ and wanted to know where to go next. This is probably as good a starting point as any.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/camp-blood-666/