Camp Hell (R)
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Also known as "Camp Hope". This came out in 2010, but I didn't see it until 2025. It's supposed to be a horror film, I guess, but there's very little horror in it, at least of the supernatural kind. There is a demon, but we don't see much of it outside of brief glimpses of one character's nightmares. The real horror is the sort of cultish nature of some enclaves of Christianity. It's ostensibly based on "true events", but I haven't seen any information about those events.

The main character is a teenage boy named Tommy, whose parents send him to Camp Hope, which is overseen by a Catholic priest named Father Phineas McAllister (Bruce Davison). And there's a rather harsh camp counselor named Christian, who mostly clashes with a sarcastic camper named Jack. There are a number of other campers, whose characters aren't well fleshed out. But Tommy has a girlfriend named Melissa, who is also attending Camp Hope (though the boys and girls are not really allowed to socialize with each other). While Jack seems to be pretty much done with organized religion from the start, the movie's plot shows how Tommy ultimately comes to reject it, himself. (I want to stress that not all Christians are like the ones portrayed in this film, so I don't think it should be taken as a condemnation of Christianity as a whole. But there definitely are more than enough Christians who are like this.) We also see a bit of Tommy's parents and little sister. His father, Michael (Andrew McCarthy), is a very strict Christian, while his mother, Patricia (Dana Delany) seems a bit more understanding. I also want to mention that the camp's chapel has a statue of like the Virgin Mary, or someone like that, and sometimes it looks rather like Patricia, which is kind of weird.

Oh, I have to mention that before camp starts, Father Phineas goes to see a young man named Daniel (Jesse Eisenberg), who is in like a psychiatric hospital or something. He had tried to kill himself and his little sister at some point, and believes that if all the bad things that happen in the world are God's will, then he hates God. Later in the film, Daniel becomes a cautionary tale for the path Tommy is headed down, but nothing really comes of that. I think Tommy will be fine. But Daniel's role in the film is very minor, yet the film was apparently marketed as if Eisenberg was one of the stars, which resulted in a lawsuit.

Anyway... at one point, Father Phineas calls Melissa a whore just for talking to Tommy. So you know he's an asshole. Later, Tommy and Melissa sneak off into the woods at night to talk some more. They start kissing and go farther than that. This apparently causes Melissa to get kicked out of Camp Hope, and Father Phineas treats Tommy as if he's a terrible sinner who is doomed to damnation. Phineas also occasionally has disturbing visions, and eventually (apparently) gets attacked by the demon from Tommy's nightmares. It's unclear to me if that was real or just Tommy's imagination, but either way... things end badly. Beyond that, there's not much else I want to divulge of the plot.

The plot is not terribly cohesive, and overall I just considered the movie kind of "meh". I didn't hate it, but I didn't really like it, either. The acting was... tolerable. I guess I kind of liked Tommy and Melissa and Jack (whose own story I thought was potentially more interesting than Tommy's, but he was actually a fairly minor character, unfortunately). Oh, I almost forgot, there's also a little gang of like goths or whatever, who occasionally try to torment the campers, but that's such a minor part of the story it just as well could have been left out entirely. Also I should say Christian is pretty easy to hate, and perhaps his name is supposed to be symbolic of Christianity as a whole. I dunno. But like I said before, not all Christians are like him (or Phineas, or Michael). There was also one worker at the camp who seemed potentially like a nice guy, but he was a super minor character. And... yeah, I don't know what else to tell you. All in all, it's just a kind of weird little movie. (If I wasn't putting my review in the "meh" category, I'd probably file it under "weird movies".)