Review #285: Camp Blood 2 (2000)

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #2 - Camp Blood 2 (2000)

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Although Camp Blood was (possibly) the first bad horror movie Lisa and I watched together in 2005, it wasn't until 2010 or so that we learned it had multiple sequels. (At that time, it had only two- Camp Blood 2 and a movie called Within the Woods- so we bought a DVD advertising itself as the "Camp Blood Trilogy". Fast forward to the 2020s, and I come to find out there's more than a dozen of these things. Unfortunately I won't be covering anything beyond the "trilogy", but hey, maybe some day.) I honestly don't remember watching Camp Blood 2 more than once or twice, so I don't quite have as much of a nostalgic connection to this one. But boy, there was still some fun to be had!

Camp Blood 2 picks up a year after the first film, with Tricia still as a mental patient and still suspected of killing nine people in Camp Blackwood. For some reason, the mental hospital allows a movie director to offer Tricia a role as a consultant for a movie he's making about the "Camp Blood murders", so she takes part in the jankiest film shoot I've ever seen while constantly suffering flashbacks of the previous film. The director takes Tricia, four actors, a drunk friend of his, and literally nobody else out to Camp Blackwood to spend the night, shoot one scene, and then get killed because obviously the killer clown (or a copycat) is still there killing everyone. Everyone but Tricia gets murdered, and then it turns out the killer is Adrienne, Harris' sister, who lucked into a role in the film and is taking revenge for Tricia's slander against her family member. Tricia manages to kill Adrienne and then the movie ends with her pushing the clown mask into Tricia's hands.

So, as crappy as the first movie was, the ending scene was actually kind of interesting- not just that Tricia was suspected of killing everyone (which I guess makes sense given the circumstances), but also that it laid the groundwork for us to think that maybe she was just crazy and therefore her entire story was suspect (by virtue of the doctor, cop, and nurse being played by the same actors as her three friends). I know I gave it a lot of crap but leaving us with the idea that maybe she fabricated everything to cope with the grief (possibly the grief of killing her friends?) was a ballsy move. But while this movie keeps her incarceration and mental instability as canon, I can't help but be a bit bummed that they dropped the fabrication/combination of her friends with other people. (It probably would have been hard to get the same actors back, but it would have been neat if that was a running theme in this movie.) There's definitely a few spots in here where it really does make you wonder if Tricia IS crazy, but ultimately it's made very, very clear that no, she's completely sane. The movie ends with the killer handing her the mask, as if to say "Now you're the killer clown", which would have made a really cool twist in future movies. But as far as I can recall of the next film (which isn't very much, granted) I'm pretty sure it never comes up again.

So I've talked about the plot, and the missed potential- but I really need to talk about some of the bonkers nonsense that this movie has in it.

The "movie" that they're "making" is straight-up "garbage". I liked how they paid lip service to the actors being in SAG and mentioned that they were passing up auditions and extra roles in other movies to be there, because it made the movie feel a bit more real, but I hated how incredibly janky and stupid the actual shoot was. Really, no film crew was needed to shoot this movie-within-a-movie? Just the director and one camera? I get that this is supposed to be a caricature, intended for an audience that has no idea how movies are made, but it would have really raised the stakes if there was actually a decent crew and they all got picked off one by one. But that would have required a higher budget I guess.

Also: not only does the "mental hospital" still look like it's just an office building with a sheet on the floor, IT'S THE SAME BUILDING AS THE CASTING STUDIO. In one scene the hallway is full of mental patients, and in the next it leads to the casting office. I half feel like they intentionally showed the hallway twice to make it clear how crappy this movie's locations were.

There's also a sequence in the middle of the film that makes zero sense. It may be hard to describe in text but I'll try my best:

1. The cast and crew is sitting around a campfire, and the director announces that it's time for bed. Despite the plan having been for seven or eight people to spend the night, nobody seems bothered by the fact that they only brought two tents.

2. One of the actresses, Vanessa, demands that she have one tent to herself. Adrienne asks Tricia if she wants to share the other one, so the director announces that "the girls get the tent, the guys sleep outside". (So I guess Vanessa gets a whole tent, Adrienne and Tricia will share the second, and then the four other people will sleep outside. Got it?)

3. The immediate next scene is Vanessa and Todd (one of the actors she has had no significant screentime with) waking up in one of the tents. Todd heard a noise, Vanessa tells him to go back to sleep.

4. Todd opens the tent door, and standing directly outside is Lance (the other actor, who has been hitting on Vanessa all movie, and she has refused his advances each time). Despite it being the middle of the night Lance is fully dressed. He asks to come into the tent so he can apologize for being so creepy to Vanessa.

5. Vanessa invites Lance in, and immediately starts making out with him. Lance asks Todd for some privacy, and Todd obliges.

6. The two are suddenly having sex. I think there's a brief shot of them taking their shirts off but then in the next shot, she's on top of him and he's about to climax.

7. Immediately after climax Lance says he's ready to go again.

8. Lance leaves the tent, Todd is nowhere to be seen and is not mentioned (nor are any of the other people supposedly sleeping outside), and then Lance and Vanessa both get killed by the clown.

9. The next morning, Adrienne is seen nudging Shemp (the drunk guy playing the clown in the movie) who is asleep in a tent. No word on which of the two tents it was.

I apologize if that was hard to follow (it's not much clearer seeing it on a screen) but each shot or scene seems unable to follow the shot or scene directly previous, and in many cases directly contradicts things that were just said or shown. At one point I thought it was surely going to turn out to be a dream sequence because of how nonsensical it was, but alas, it all canonically happened.

And one final ridiculous bonkers nonsense (two more, actually) comes during the climax, right around the big reveal that Adrienne is Harris' sister. First, her entire motivation seems to be "How dare you accuse someone in my family of being a murderer. Just for that, I'm going to murder some people to prove you wrong" which is just perfect. But more importantly, Adrienne and Tricia fight each other, ending with Tricia grabbing a lighter and setting Adrienne's padded boiler suit on fire. Adrienne is then faced with a choice: either run ten feet away to the nearby stream to put herself out (as we see Tricia run across it a moment later), or jump into a tent and explode. I bet you can guess which one she chose.

Anyway, in conclusion, I think Camp Blood 2 is a much sillier film than the first one, which makes it more enjoyable in some ways, but is a lot less coherent and feels even less believable. (Which is quite an accomplishment.) If you only have time to watch one bad movie, I would recommend the first Camp Blood over the second any day without much thought. And yet, I think the second takes itself a lot less seriously and will get a lot more laughs- and let's face it, you're watching these movies to laugh at them.

Overall Rating: 4/10 New Jersey Screams

Nostalgic Rating: 3/10 Severed Hands Gripping a Joint

Another Missed Opportunity: I already said it was a bummer the movie just discarded the idea that Tricia was confusing the doctor for her dead boyfriend (or vice versa), but there's also a scene where she's in the casting studio and she's given a stack of headshots and asked which one looks the most like Jay (so they can cast someone that looks like her boyfriend to play her boyfriend). I think it would have been a great touch to actually put that actor's headshot in the stack, so she could have a double-take (and possibly realize it's not actually him, she just imagined it), but alas, it never happened. It would have been quite easy with small changes like this to make Camp Blood 2 a legitimately scary and unsettling movie; but that doesn't seem to be what they were going for.