Camping Trip
The summer of 2020, bare shelves and empty streets, yet the world is wide and just beyond the cities under lockdown is the great outdoors, four friends driving out to the lake for a few days of swimming, drinking, partying and archery practice, hoping the break will allow them to leave their problems behind them, or at least grant them some perspective.
Instead, believing they are totally alone in the wilderness, they are shocked to hear gunshots and shortly after find a body, but the discovery of a stash of cash hidden in their tent could be the answer to all their problems of unemployment and debt. Will they call the police and report the murder, take the money and run, or just stay and party for another night, announcing their presence to all within miles with loud music?
Co-directed by brothers Demian Fuica and Leonardo Fuica, the latter who also wrote the script, Camping Trip aims to present a wilderness survival thriller set in the time of Covid but populates it with individuals so stupid Charles Darwin would wash his hands of them and let nature take its course, never considering that a body in the woods and a the sack of bundled banknotes might be linked with the gunshots they heard rather than a gift from the unseen fairy of the forest.
Established as selfish and inconsiderate of others from the opening scene, couples Enzo and Polly (Leonardo Fuica and Caitlin Cameron) and Ace and Coco (Alex Gravenstein and Hannah Forest Briand) at each turn make decisions which make their situation worse, Fuica’s script unable to provide justifiable reasoning over vapid squabbling which turns to blaming each other when two angry men show up looking for their “friend” and, by extension, the cash he stole from them.
Orick and Billy (Michael D’Amico and Jonathan Vanderzon) similarly untroubled by deep thought or self-reflection, having killed their obsessive-compulsive accomplice in a fit of rage rather than interrogating him to find where he has hidden the money, had Camping Trip been played as a comedy it might have been tolerable, but other than the orgy free-for-all where the only heat comes from the campfire it remains staunchly straight.
Astonishingly running to almost two unnecessary hours of watching awful people have a bad time, Camping Trip does manage the surprising feat of actually getting worse as it goes along, the Fuica brothers demonstrating the range of camera settings available to them with a slow motion attempted rape scene which makes the earlier orgy seem tasteful, as well as access to a drone for both time lapse and slow motion aerial shots of the lake, the stunning scenery the only saving grace of the film; in summary, being eaten alive by bears would be preferable.
Camping Trip will be available on Digital Download from Tuesday 16th August
