Campfire Stories--Keep It Around the Fire

Writing credits Bob Cea

Jamie-Lynn Sigler .... Natalie John Hensley .... Donny Abigail Spencer .... Melissa Joshua Harto .... Teddy Charlie Day .... Joe Buster Poindexter .... Ranger Bill (secretly David Johansen!) John Quinn .... Dentist George Kmeck .... Patient/Janitor Alain Sy .... Inmate Beckie King .... Petra

R 90 min

This is a rare surprise for me. Campfire Stories represents a movie in a class that hasn't been covered broadly in the last ten years or so.

Campfire Stories is a collection of three short vignettes (boy, bet you never thought you'd see THAT word, eh? eh?) with a central theme. In this case, it's a few kids get into an accident, seek a little shelter while they wait for a tow, and start telling some scary stories around a campfire. The ending, of course, is a surprise twist that makes all three vignettes, or stories, connect to each other in a way that only makes sense when viewed in retrospect.

The "collection movie" as it's sometimes called, can have one of two possible results. It's either a way to dump garbage storylines, as was the case with Deadtime Stories, or it can be a surprising and refreshing break with the ordinary, as in John Carpenter's Body Bags.

Campfire Stories lodges itself firmly into the category.

We kick it off with a talkative, loudmouthed flaming skull describe in brief the history of campfire stories and how they relate to a comic book he stars in. I know, it's pretty ambitious for a minute segment, and it actually comes off as kind of preachy and unnecessary. This Cryptkeeper knock off then fades from the picture, and we get our first shot of "the world of Campfire Stories."

And boy howdy, is it a doozy.

We've got a mental hospital that deals in pain threshold therapy losing one of its particularly nasty inmates, with relatively predictable results. Dig on the PC thuggery and stilted dialogue, featuring such KILLER phrases as "It's just Rodney being the sanitary napkin he is." and "What a penile implant." I'm STILL chortling over those. Who wrote this crap?

They say that if ten thousand monkeys worked at ten thousand typewriters, they'd produce the works of Shakespeare.

I'm guessing THIS script would take them about twenty minutes.

Second up, we get an Indian with a magic bag and the miscreants (all white, and almost all male) who mean to seize it. Oh, yeah, and there's Dire Consequences (tm) when they do--featuring the most bizarre peyote induced hallucinations you've seen in a movie in the last couple weeks, not to mention the most bizarre drug sequence you've seen since "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Assuming you've seen "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

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