Wopsploitation: "Cannibal Campout"(1988)d/Jon McBride, Tom Fisher

Ah, the good old days of shot-on-video slasher movies.You could shoot the genre equivalent of America's Funniest Home Videos (except Tom Bergeron would be fifteen to twenty gallons of stage blood, and the larfs are mostly unintentional) with a cast of non-actors(translation: buddies) and a budget that entails one vhs camcorder and little else, and still find your completed work on a horror shelf next to J.G. Patterson's Dr. Gore and Don Dohler's Nightbeast in some out-of-the-way Mom and Pop video rental store way back when.Whenever things like Boardinghouse(1982) or The Ripper(1985) found their way into my antediluvian top loader, I knew better than to boost my expectancies beyond cheap laughs and nudity, phony gore, and maybe a quotably smelly line of dialogue or two if I was lucky.More often than not, these z-grade cheapies were an insult to viewer intelligence and a shameful embarrassment to every person involved in the production, especially anyone in front of the camera, since not only are you visible to any sorry sprig-frigger who watches the movie, you're mostly likely doing it dressed like an extra on fucking Silver Spoons to boot.
Independent film director Jon McBride, who helmed tonight's review, was just such a visionary cat of sorts.He had four hundred bucks, he had a camcorder, he had wooded Connecticut locations he could guerilla some lame-yet-passable scenes in, and he had friends willing enough to help him out in seeing his project come to fruition.After six months of production, the spoiled fruit of his labours could be found on the shelf at Gateway Video, where I first stumbled upon it, in the days when chicks dressed like Wild Bill Hickok and styled their hair like they'd just been electrocuted.That very night, my glassies were assaulted by electron beams that told a story that went like this...

fragstache(frah*g*stash)n. a moustache of little acclaim.Usually detrimental to the wearer's grill.See:above screencap.
After a witty-ish disclaimer, a Guidette flashdancer(Nancy Sciarra)with a New Yawk accent that's thicker than Kirstey Alley post-feeding frenzy at a Krispy Kreme goes for a jog where she's suddenly brained by an axe-wielding oaf in a pilot's helmet.Jon(McBride himself), Ray(Ray Angelic)(a fat zits/braces kid in a bleached jean jacket with Cro Mags back patch!), and Carrie(Carrie Lindell) discuss the upcoming camping trip to Redston, where a family has recently vanished, leaving an empty blood-splashed station wagon in their stead.With Chris(Chris Granger) and Amy(Amy Chludzinski...all the characters are named after the actors, I get it, I get it) on board, the quartet sings along to some country tune and blow the dust off of a stale 'dead baby' joke as they drive vertiginously towards isolation.Jon finds the narrow dirt road blocked by a pimp era Lincoln Continental, occupied by two noncompliant hayseeds who noise up the campers and pull a knife, signalling a brief skirmish in the woods.Together with their silent sibling, Joe(Joseph Salheb, who also handled the makeup), who wears a pilot helmet, they comprise a family of backwoods cannibals whose food supply has run dangerously low.Rich(Richard Marcus), the gimpy pigeon-toed loudmouth, is only worried about pussy.They harken back to a great hunting experience of yesteryear when they eighty-sixed some hairpig bimbo with a machete as the goober in farmer overalls makes a Krueger-esque wisecrack while he licks the blade.At the campsite, the boys need to leave the girls behind and make a wood run, despite being four feet from a dilapidated cabin.The girls prove there's more than enough wood in both of their performances.Meanwhile, Ray and John plan an epic scare for their friends that night, involving a dimestore hockey mask, while resting back-to-back against the same tree(weirdos).Joe shows up with machete in tow and cleaves John's face with it.Cue: dated synthesizer stab.

How long before we finally see this kid signin' 8" x 10"s at Chiller? Kidding.
Jon and Carrie share a pensive moment alone while, elsewhere, Ray meets his maker in one of the abandoned cabins at the hands of Overalls, and Amy tells Chris she's expecting.At the cannibal abode, Rich spills his guts to a girl's severed head("that retahd gets tuh fuck all the girls...wit his undahweah on!").Carrie wanders off to smoke a butt in one of the cabins only to get machete-diced by Overalls, who ends the scene with another stilted wisecrack as the stage blood spurts everywhere.The three remaining campers split up to find the missing girl when Amy is scooped up by a continuity-free Overalls who's clean as a whistle in the same clothes he bloodied in the previous scene.With the imminent threat of Amy at knifepoint quelling any thoughts of revenge or escape, Jon and Chris are tied up by the other flesheaters.Jon is forced to square off in a continuity-free battle(his hands are tied behind his back, then they aren't, then they are...reminds me of that ol' Donovan tune) of axe v. sledgehammer with the grotesque pilot and after losing, gets pull-gutsed by the other two carnivores.Rich gives Chris a Columbian necktie and plants an axe in his grill, with a wisecrack to follow.Amy manages to break loose, wounding Rich, before running off into the forest with Joe chasing after.She de-gas masks him, revealing a deformed facepiece(saw that coming.)underneath, but his bros end her uprising, pull-gutsing her, too, for good measure.We see our cannibal killers again as colorful fall leaves blow off the surrounding trees, and Rich complains about hunger pains and their mother's disdain for fast food("The preservatives and additives'll kill you!"), with their hunt bringing them too far from their smokehouse to return for a meal.Overalls has a sudden epiphany and turns towards Rich while drawing his knife.Rich probably shoulda kept his big mouth shut.

In the yap, not on the grill, Cap'n Shloppy.
McBride has starred in a commercial for Fanta orange drink(!), and directed himself eleven direct-to-video titles to date, starting with the notoriously bad-good Woodchipper Massacre(1988),and culminating in everything from Gorilla Warfare:Battle of the Apes(2002) to Black Mass(2005), in between, and though I can't claim to have seen all of his movies, it's a pretty safe bet he's no James Cameron waiting for that tremendous cinematic break that sets him for life, though I honestly doubt that was very high on his list of goals in the first place.He's reached an international market during a highly romanticized era in genre films, and probably gets recognized for it from a small group of obscure film buffs not entirely unlike your humble N over here, and cheap cheeziness aside, that probably does him just fine in the end.On the scale, Campout merits an obvious one wop and is worth a look for nostalgic horror fans wanting to reminisce about the videotape era.Afterall, as Rich would say, it's a small, small, smaaaaaall, small, small, SMALL, smaaaaalll world....