USA Up All Night used to take campy films full of nudity and exploitation, edit them for television, and air them on late night TV. The results were often comical, with thin plots made even harder to follow, with large chunks of the films missing. These movies were always dumb and pointless, but when you’re a middle-schooler with basic cable, it could be worse.
Camp Manna is worse. It wants very desperately to channel old horndog movies like Meatballs (1979) or Porky’s (1981), but its premise betrays itself. I never thought I’d say this, but Camp Manna would have benefited from some raunchiness. I’m not sure there’s anything that could have made it a good movie, but an honest reimagining of the summer camp genre may have at least made it nostalgic.
Bottom line – this is a faith-based movie disguised as old-school summer camp hijinks. Rumor has it that puritanical billionaire and wannabe schoolmarm Betsy DeVos is one of its financiers – which, my friends, is a bad, bad thing. Add to that its inclusion of racial and homophobic stereotypes and things get worse by the minute. Was the addition of an African child who can’t speak English and a token effeminate gay kid an attempt at an homage to the care-free and racially insensitive days of the 1980s? If so, it failed miserably. At best, it’s bad comedy. At worst, Camp Manna is racist and homophobic.
What bugs me the most is that Camp Manna had me fooled. I went in thinking this was a film about an atheist kid forced to go to a Christian summer camp. As the only free thinker in the whole place, he would, I hoped, point out the many contradictions and vagaries of the Bible. In the end, science and reason would triumph over willful ignorance and self-deception. Too bad that wasn’t the case. The Bible and Jesus win, and very few characters learn a damn thing – except how to (!SPOILER ALERT!) get over your parents being eaten by alligators while baptizing you in a Florida lake. Have mercy.
My bleeding heart and personal aversion to religious indoctrination aside, Camp Manna is poorly made. Its characters are never developed, often switching personalities and loyalties on a whim. There’s no sense of who anyone is (except maybe for Gary Busey’s deranged camp director, Cujo). Motivations are sometimes made clear but are contradicted at almost every turn. It’s also impossible to get a sense of what the movie is trying to say. It’s so-called Christians are all greedy and self-interested, with no virtue whatsoever. Is it desirable to be a selfish, self-motivated Christian? According to Camp Manna, it would seem so. In fact, most of the crappy hypocrisies and lax Biblical interpretations are rewarded and admired. I shouldn’t be surprised, though, that’s kind of how the church operates. Art imitates life, right?
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.