Camp Utopia (2002) (USA)

⭐️⭐️

Back in 1969, guru Timothy Bach (Ratt’s own Stephan Pearcy) holds a hypnotic hold over his hippie disciples at the Northern California commune they call home. Peace and love takes a turn when something snaps in Bach and he systematically slaughters a handful of his followers. Opening text tells us most of this and then grainy footage stretches on through the credits as Bach watches over a bunch of hippies that definitely look like aughties Californians playing hippies and doing stereotypical hippie nonsense. So, nudity and drugs. Some thirty years later, a group of “teenagers” head out to the area for a “camping extravaganza” well aware of the twisted history the place carries. Two spoiled idiots, their doofus girlfriends and odd-woman out new girl all roughing it in the woods with no tech allowed. New girl Dee Dee mentions she was adopted during some character-building on the way to the woods and my warning bells begin to sound. There’s hiking, goofin’ around, doobie passin’ and general horniness as the group search out the site of the massacre and get on each other’s nerves. A forest ranger ogles one of the girls who goes searching for fire wood and warns them to be safe. We get a brief retelling of the slaughter over a campfire (bad acid seems to have been the cause and Timothy Bach was never caught) and then the “youth” wax poetic about the hippie mentality. Night one passes slowly with a lot of blue balls and talking. Stock-bro Vesper gets up to take a morning leak and gets a rock to the back of his noggin. His girlfriend worries and her friend Gretchen sends her boyfriend out to find their missing member. It takes no time to discover his corpse but it’s set up to look like he fell and hit his head. Ranger Rodgers agrees with the accidental death assessment by teenage football star Lance. Rodgers goes off for help and takes Vesper’s body with him. Rodgers soon joins Vesper in the afterlife. With no help coming it becomes a lot easier for whoever it is creeping around the woods to take out the dinks. The inevitable is revealed, the message is hammered home with all the subtly of repeated kicks to the dick and the climax takes up way too much time. If you know me, you know this era of low-energy horror is my wheelhouse thanks to grabbing whatever straight-to-DVD nonsense made its way to the video store shelf. So no matter how lame it may be, it’s fortunately right in my comfort zone. The story comes off like a repurposed porno script by some burnt out former hippie missing the sixties who really wanted to make a slasher flick but was too lazy to write his own. There’s a bunch of set up for sex in the woods that never happens and the slasher shenanigans are nothing special but there’s a certain charm to it that maybe me and a dozen other idiots can get behind.