The Unwatchable Movie Challenge: Reel 2

Movie: Teenape Goes to Camp
Tagline: No more teachers, no more books …only Teenape’s dirty looks!
Director: Chris Seaver
Starring: Meredith Host, Casey Bowker, Jesse Ames, A.J. Stabone, Josh Suire
Released: 2008 
This film has no rating.
Runtime: 61 min
Genre: Comedy | Horror
Writer: Chris Seaver

Length of Movie I Watched:
I sat through every terrible minute of it.

Verdict: As bad as this poster makes this move look, it is worse. If you have an ounce of decency in your soul, spare yourself and anyone else the pain of having to watch this.

 

Here’s the trailer. Watch at your own risk.

So Reel 2 finally happened. This time around I was the one issuing the challenge. I started to miss “Teeth” a little bit while watching this. At least in Reel 1 the production values were existent, but with a company name like “Low Budget Productions” I shouldn’t have expected anything great. This movie definitely tested our ability to watch a bad movie and really amped up the challenge from Reel 1. I think as far as the “Unwatchable Movie Challenge” goes, if you think to yourself, “Maybe I shouldn’t have picked this movie after all” throughout the film, it was a good challenge.

This movie opens for no reason with a Pirates of the Caribbean parody. It then changes to follow the 80’s raunchy comedies path for the majority of the movie and eventually switches again to slasher and action parodies.
The acting is subpar, no, that doesn’t describe it well enough. When I was in high school I produced a half hour television pilot with some friends. We all were decent high-school actors, but we cast additional people who had no idea what acting was. Instead of coaching and directing the less experienced up to match our levels, everybody just seemed to suck worse. I loved to watch that show after we made it, coming back to it now, I despise it. It is absolutely atrocious. THIS MOVIE IS WORSE THAN THAT! It honestly just seems like a bunch of friends wanted to make something silly, they did, and somehow they are distributing this film and several more all over the place. I picked this up off of Netflix. While browsing their website I discovered that they have received a nod from Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman. www.dorkswithoutfaces.com/lowbudgetpictures/index.html 

The writing is forced, they want to offend you in the style that South Park or Family Guy has offensive humor just to offend everyone. It doesn’t come off as offensive or funny. Perhaps I am biased, because I am a comedy writer and don’t really enjoy that kind of style of forcing dirty words into lines because of the “Ha Ha, you said poopy!” type of humor. But going back as far as the original “Scary Movie” and the ridiculous amounts of crap that monster has spawned I have hated them. I think humor should be more layered than poop jokes. And just because they have several layers of poop, doesn’t make it a layered joke.

Obviously, Teenape will have his followers, he will have people that think his gorilla mask that barely covers his face is part of the “feel” of the film. I have no problem with low budget raunchy comedies. I love Troma. I love camp, and that’s not the log cabins in the woods kind of camp, I mean campy humor. Over the top, obviously fake gore also has no problems in my book. But there is a way to do it right. There are cheap ways to make your title character not sound like he is talking inside a mask for an hour. There are cheap ways to cast your production with competent actors. And the cheapest thing of all is writing decent material to work with. I like low budget indie films. I think they can find a place and now and then even contend with the big budget Hollywood blockbusters. “Teenape goes to Camp” fails on all levels as a film. I have not seen any of their other productions, but I hope that they are much better. For the sake of all humanity.

I don’t even want to think where Reel 3 is going to take us…

Until next time, may god have mercy on your soul,
-- “The Erik” Sanburn

P.S. Coming next week I will be releasing the 5-part short story chronicling my recent adventures in life. I know a lot of you aren’t up with the full story, but all will be revealed soon.