Ah, summer camp. Ah, movies that rip off movies about summer camp. Ah, movies that rip off movies about summer camp while also ripping off movies about singing, dancing high schoolers. And mean, snobby high schoolers who need to learn manners. Oh, and there’s a big wakeboarding competition, too. Buckle up, campers, because we’re about to take a flinchingly frank peek at the 2008 movie, King Of the Camp.
It’s time for another summer at Camp Wahanowin, and the camp counselors and kitchen staff are the first to arrive. Everyone’s got their eye on being King or Queen of the Camp, which is sort of like Homecoming King and Queen, and it all comes down to who can win the camp tournament, including the big wakeboarding contest. Yeah. Wakeboarding is a thing for some reason.
Chase Gunn (Isaac Haig), whose dad owns the camp, shows up with his adoring girlfriend, Jackie (Dena Chiarcossi), who’s the yoga instructor, at the same time as Samantha (Tonya Harper), who seems to be a mixture of Sharpey Evans, Tess from Camp Rock, and Regina George.
Yep, Sammy is popular, she’s a social climber, she’s a diva, and she has an entourage of adoring fans, er, friends, er, toadies. Whatever they’re called, none of them have any original thoughts, so there’s that. Jackie is pretty territorial about Chase, though, and asserts herself quickly.
Once all the counselors have shown up, everyone does a hey-we’re-back song that looks a bit like “Brand New Day,” with very similar choreography, by the way, never mind that it’s two years before Camp Rock 2. After that it’s time to sit around and look haughty and compare rich kid notes while they wait for the campers to show up.
The only one who seems sort of down to earth is Cindy (Ashley Carter), who hasn’t even brought her makeup kit to camp because she’s there to do camp stuff and have a great time. Naturally, she’s prettier than all of the shallow minxes who hauled in their beauty aids, yet no one mentions that.
Arriving at about the same time as the kids is Will Cross (Justin Stadnyk), who has presumably walked from his hometown to the camp, wherever his hometown is, and funnily enough, he doesn’t look even slightly winded or dusty from the road, despite the fact that half a dozen giant tour buses have just rolled past him. He’ll walk back out again later, but we won’t go into that. The camp counselors eye him snarkily, especially Samantha, who notes that Will doesn’t even use hair products.
When Mr. No Hair Products meets Miss No Makeup Kit it’s very cute and slightly meaningful. They’re perfect for each other, of course, but Will works in the kitchen, and Chase’s dad has laid down a hard and fast rule that the kitchen staff and the counselors aren’t supposed to mix for some reason. At all. The kitchen staff are the lowest of the low and therefore beneath the notice of the counselors. That’s nice and totally not elitist of him, right?
Chase has it in for Will, who’s immediately smitten with Cindy, and who’s good with the kids, especially Sarah (Sydney Trotter), who leaves off writing “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” letters to join in camp activities. Will is also a kick-butt wakeboarder, of course. Things get complicated, well, as complicated as they can get in a movie like this. Will disguises himself as a counselor named Rob (Sef Wood), who is supposed to be wakeboarding in the camp competition dressed as Zorro, because Rob has a major crush on Samantha and he wants to impress her.
In case it isn’t clear already, the movie cutely and royally sucks, although there are a few scenes of classic camp activities, such as tug of war, egg races and sticking Lifesavers on people’s faces. The movie is extremely hackneyed, the filming angles are kind of unflattering in spots, and the character development is non-existent. Remember how Jackie was all territorial about Chase in the beginning of the movie? Later on she really doesn’t care when Samantha is suddenly hanging on Chase’s arm even though no one’s said anything and nothing’s happened except that we find out for the millionth time that Samantha is a social-climbing gold digger.
Then there’s Cindy, who has no problem hanging out with Will until he wants to show her something in his cabin, and that’s not as frat-boy as it sounds. I hope not, anyway. Spoiler alert: We never find out what Will wants to show Cindy. It’s just something that’s hanging there, never to be realized. And no, that’s not Freudian, either. Much.
None of these characters are original, of course. Just about every cast member looks like someone famous. We’ve got the Queen Bees except that Samantha looks like Ashley Tisdale, we’ve got an ersatz Willem Dafoe, most of the guys look like refugees from boy bands, Chase looks a little bit like that Don dude from Napoleon Dynamite, and Jackie sorta looks like Ashlee Simpson.
The songs are, of course, pretty awkward and substandard, and the choreography is even more so. The cheese is abundant. There’s one part in the first number when Chase is singing about how all the ladies want him and he shows his armpits, which is both creepy and weird. In one number sung by the kitchen staff that’s not unlike “Stick To the Status Quo,” the chef squirts ketchup and mustard all over his chef’s coat and then he wipes them off.
And just in case anyone’s wondering what kind of budget this movie has, the stain is there all the rest of the movie. They get points for continuity, I guess.
And oh yeah, there are the campers, most of whom don’t get much to do. There’s one kid who dresses like a mid-nineties rapper and only speaks in rhyme, but does he get to rap? Um, no. And there’s another kid who complains all the time, and when he complains about the food the rest of the camp joins him, because he does have a point, so an entire song is built around how bad the food is. Maybe if Herr Gunn would let people relax and mingle the food would improve, but I digress.
There are two numbers that are sort of decent, though. One happens when Jackie’s yoga class has a dance-off with Samantha’s dance team, and even then the song is so memorable I can’t remember the name of it. The other is the closing song when the cast sings about how they’ll all be friends forever, but again, the title doesn’t stick out.
Whoops, did I spoil something? Sowwy. 😉
The funny thing is, while King of the Camp is clearly copying High School Musical in spots, it was shot at around the same time as Camp Rock and contains some of the same plot elements, namely the kitchen staff being personae non grata. Who was copying who, here? Or is it mere coincidence? We’ll never know. Camp Rock was clearly the better movie, though, in my opinion, so it probably stole everyone’s thunder, plus it is, of course, a Disney movie.
I don’t think anyone remembers anything about King of the Camp, to be honest, because it doesn’t exactly get any kind of star treatment, not even a Wiki page, although that’s no loss. Most of the actors have had minimal to no acting careers beyond this movie, as evidenced by the lack of digital glossies on the film’s IMDb page. It also doesn’t help that Tubi’s copy looks pixilated half the time and the sound isn’t great, kinda like what happened with Sunday School Musical, only in this case I’m not going to buy the DVD just to see if anything improves. King Of the Camp is not exactly visiting royalty, even of the so-bad-it’s-good variety.
My post for the Legends of Western Cinema Week will be up tomorrow. As always, thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you then…
King of the Camp is available on DVD from Amazon. It is also currently streaming on Tubi.
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