Camp Nowhere

Camp Nowhere (1994) 

Dir. by Jonathan Prince

Starring Jonathan Jackson, Melody Kay, Andrew Keegan and Christopher Lloyd

[content warning: child endangerment]

Plot:

Tired of being sent to boring summer camps by their parents, three teenagers blackmail a former drama teacher into helping them convince their parents into sending them to a fake camp that he will “run,” while they use their parents’ money to have fun all summer.  Soon, half of the school is in on the con, and Camp Nowhere is born.  However, they have to scramble to pull off an even bigger con when the parents demand to have a day to visit – and each of them expects to see a different type of camp.

Nostalgia:

I saw this in theaters when it first came out.  I was 12 years old at the time, the perfect age for the movie.  I don’t remember if we had it on video or not.  I’m leaning towards not, because while I have a fair bit of recollection of it it’s not one of those movies that I remember chapter and verse.

Review:

The year before this movie came out, I crossed over from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts.  That gave me my first opportunity to attend a Boy Scout summer camp.  I’d been to day camps before, and a couple of weekend long camping trips, but this was the first time that I spent an entire week away from my parents.   It was a rocky first experience (there was some staff-on-camper bullying involved), but it was the start of a long string of regular summer camping for me that lasted until I went away to college.

I think that’s why this movie resonated so much with me at the time.  I was really into Scouts and camping for a long time, and quite a few of my favorite kid-oriented comedies from this time period (Heavyweights, Bushwhacked, etc.) involved camping in some way.  None of these movies did particularly well at the box office, and have mostly been forgotten, but I was pretty much the exact target audience for them.

Of course, looking back at them as an adult, it’s clear to me exactly why they didn’t succeed with audiences or critics.  For most of its run time, Camp Nowhere is pretty much just scene after scene of teenagers goofing off. There’s also some mildly uncomfortable cringe humor thrown in as the main character Mud and the teacher (played by Christopher Lloyd in full Christopher Lloyd mode) attempt to con various authority figures into believing that there’s nothing going on at the camp.  I’ll admit that scenes like the dinner sequence, where Mud and Lloyd are improvising a fake father-son relationship while Lloyd has a dinner date with the doctor that treated Mud’s injured arm earlier in the film, are mildly triggering to me now, and I had to mute that particular scene until it was over.  One too many bad experiences being put on the spot by teachers in high school, I guess.

And, of course, there’s the matter of the reckless endangerment of children.  The aforementioned injured arm occurred due to an accident involving unsupervised use of fireworks.  The kids are walking around with chainsaws, riding dune buggies, and doing who knows what else with all of the money that their parents paid to send them to camp.  This was all super fun to see when I was a kid myself, of course, but now I’ve been through multiple Youth Protection training classes as an adult Scout leader, and live in a house with two young children.  I don’t really find much of the antics in the movie funny anymore.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I totally hated this rewatch.  There was actually at least one extended sequence that I did enjoy quite a lot: the Parent’s Day con at the end.  It was what I remembered most about the movie before I watched it, and is where the movie stops being a series of episodic happenings and actually comes together into something with a definitive plot.  The parents variously believe that their children are attending weight loss, computer, drama or military camps, and the kids have to quick-change the camp into each version as the parents arrive and leave, leaving little room for error or the entire game is up.  It’s a very Home Alone-esque series of Rube Goldberg gags to transform the camp each time, and I wish more of the movie had gone this way.

Alas, it did not, and despite enjoying the final 15 minutes or so I can’t really recommend the movie.  I really liked the movie when I was younger, but now I find myself much more on the side of the parents than the kids.  Maybe not to the point of sending my nieces to “Camp Microchip,” but I’ve seen medical billing now, and know just how much putting your eye out with a BB gun actually costs.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: C-

Stray Thoughts: 

-One of the parents is played by Kate Mulgrew, something that I had absolutely no recollection of (and probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway, considering I didn’t watch any Star Trek at all until I was in college)

-This is supposedly Jessica Alba’s first screen role, but even knowing that going in I failed to notice her at all throughout the movie.

An American Tail

An American Tail (1986)
Dir. by Don Bluth

Starring Phillip Glasser, Nehemiah Persoff, John P. Finnegan and Dom DeLuise

[content warning: extensive talk of antisemitism, immigrant persecution, child labor, trauma-inducing images and a brief reference to the Irish-English conflict]

Plot:

After their home is burned in an anti-Jewish pogrom in the 1880s, a family of Russian mice emigrate to the United States. Separated from the rest of his family upon arrival, young Fievel Mousekewitz sets out on a quest to find them, and ends up inspiring the mice of New York City to fight back against the cats that are oppressing them.

Nostalgia:

As I said in my The Land Before Time review, I know that this was one of the first movies that my parents took me to see in the theater. However, I have absolutely no memory of doing so, and only remember it from the VHS copy that I grew up with. I did have a Fievel stuffed animal, however, that I retained for a very long time – probably at least middle school, if not high school.

Review:

What is it with Don Bluth and making incredibly dark movies, anyway? This is the second Bluth movie I’ve watched for this project, and I have strong memories of the other two big Bluth movies (The Secret of NIMH and All Dogs Go to Heaven). And from what I’ve seen and remember, all four have content that would be likely to give their target audience nightmares. It’s like each successive movie in his filmography was playing an escalating game of “hold my beer” with childhood trauma.

This movie begins with the destruction of the Mousekewitz family home in Russia by Cossacks, in a rather intense burst of sudden violence. While I was definitely too young to understand what was going on, I now find it pretty clear that this is supposed to be an anti-Semitic pogrom, especially given the family’s surname and nationality. Their religion is never brought up explicitly during the film, though there’s definite allusions to it in the ending (more on that later). While I think that there’s definitely a missed opportunity for more concrete representation here, I’m not sure how much of it really would have fit the narrative they devised, given how much of the movie focuses on a fairly young child trying to navigate a city on his own. 

Speaking of which, this movie really doesn’t shy away from the horrors that might happen to a lost kid in 1880s New York. Almost the first thing that happens to Fievel after he arrives is being sold into labor in a sweatshop by a businessman that pretends to be helping him find his family. He gets chased, nearly eaten, attacked by humans, and even after triumphing over the cats is left for dead and ends up crying alone in a puddle in the rain. Thanks, Bluth, for attempting to traumatize the parents this time as well as the kids.

But hey, at least there are songs in this one, to break the depressing mood and give some light to the movie, right? Yeah, about that… The songs are all pretty memorable, even if I only remembered the one distinctly going in. However, even the happy ones are quite dark when you look at them closer. The big rousing number at the beginning, “There Are No Cats in America”, in addition to being dramatic irony itself in that we the audience know that there are indeed cats there, is actually just a series of stories of loss and murder. The Italian mouse portrays cats as mob bosses who murder his mother (in what might be a Godfather IIreference), and the Irish mouse’s girlfriend is eaten by a calico – a cat whose colors could easily be described as “black and tan.”

And the actual plan that the mice enact to get rid of their cat oppressors is something right out of a horror movie. I only had vague memories of the movie’s ending, but I sure as hell wasn’t expecting a steampunk mecha-mouse version of the Golem of Prague! The fact that the “Great Mouse of Minsk” is clearly rotoscoped over actual photographs of a real-life version of the thing makes it even creepier and nightmare-inducing. Are we absolutely sure that Bluth wasn’t paid off by a cartel of unscrupulous child psychologists looking for extra business?

Despite all of that, however….I still actually enjoyed the movie! The animation itself is gorgeous, obvious rotoscoping aside, and all of the songs are quite memorable. I’m not sure I’m going to be showing it to my nieces like, ever, but as an adult I definitely appreciate the craft that went in to making it a lot more than I did as a child. Still not sure why I never had any nightmares about it, though.

Nostalgia: B
Rewatch: B+, extensive “WTH, Bluth!?” notwithstanding

Stray Thoughts:

-“Somewhere Out There” positively destroys me every time. I watched this on my laptop using a Buffalo Wild Wings’ public wifi, and I was sloppy-crying in the restaurant.

-Even though critics were mixed on the movie, it ended up becoming the highest-grossing non-Disney animated film in U.S. history up to that point. It actually beat the Disney movie released that year, The Great Mouse Detective, at the box office by quite a lot. Disney and Bluth would have a rivalry for several more movies, going head-to-head until The Little Mermaid started the Disney Renaissance and pretty much ended Bluth’s time as a major competitor.

Cloak & Dagger

Cloak & Dagger (1984)

Dir. by Richard Franklin

Starring Henry Thomas, Dabney Coleman and Michael Murphy

[content warning: significant child endangerment, implied ageism]

Plot:

A kid obsessed with secret agent tabletop RPGs and video games finds himself in a real spy adventure when a murdered government agent gives him classified documents disguised as a video game just before dying.  Chased by spies and mercenaries, he eludes capture with the help of his imaginary friend: his James Bond-like RPG character, the superspy Jack Flack.

Nostalgia:

I remember watching this movie a lot when I was a kid, and remembered a lot of the San Antonio-based set pieces.  However, I haven’t seen it in at least twenty years, and there were good portions of the movie (such as the kid next door who becomes a hostage, and then later is his “girl in the chair”) that I’d forgotten about entirely.

Review:

Wasn’t I just talking last review about the willingness of 80s movies to place their teen and pre-teen protagonists in real danger?  This movie sees The Goonies with its hardened criminals and pirate booby traps and says “Hold my beer.”  Over the course of one two-day period, Henry Thomas’s character, Davey Osborne, witnesses a murder, has his house broken into by armed thugs, gets chased halfway across the city by spies who are willing to shoot at him in broad daylight, has to negotiate a hostage exchange, gets locked in a car trunk with a dead body, escapes, gets kidnapped and locked in the trunk again, steals the car and tries to drive it away while being shot at, and gets taken hostage again, this time while there’s a bomb about to go off in an airport.  That’d be a pretty good adventure checklist for a Bond movie, and Davey is only 11. 

The movie is also quite willing to engage with the difference between Davey’s spy fantasies and real-life.  His imaginary friend, Jack Flack (played by the same actor who plays his single father, Dabney Coleman), initially seems a figure of fun and youthful innocence, a spy figure in the mode of Roger Moore’s lighter take on the Bond character.  However, as the movie progresses, and the stakes start getting higher, Flack reveals a ruthless, pragmatic side, constantly pushing Davey to take more risks and morally-ambiguous actions.  It starts small, with him urging Davey to shoplift an identical video game to the spy-doctored one so he can use the fake during the hostage negotiation.  By the end of the movie, he’s talking down to Davey for not wanting to “play” at being a spy anymore, and eventually goads him into committing an outright murder.  Sure, he could definitely claim it was in self-defense, as the villain had been trying to kill him all day long, but Davey is the one who picks up the gun and pulls the trigger himself.

This movie straight-up has an 11-year-old kill someone

The screenplay displays a deep distrust of adults, even more so than Henry Thomas’s previous movie E.T. Throughout the film, every adult and authority figure that Davey turns to brushes him off.  When he reports the initial murder to the building’s security, they decide he’s been playing a prank when they can’t find the body.  It’s implied that his mother had recently died, and that both his father and the police think that he’s acting out as a coping mechanism.  His friend and GM, the clerk at the local game store, gets shot by the bad guys as soon as Davey leaves the building.  And all of the people he approaches while on the run laugh at him, with the exception of a nice elderly couple – who turn out to be the real villains of the film, the spies who were paying the mercenaries to steal the documents in the first place. They drug him, affably talk about killing him after the deal where he can hear them, and later take him as a hostage at the airport and attempt to commandeer a flight out of the country.  Even Jack Flack, as he’s “dying”, tells Davey that he was “always on his own.”  This might be one of the darkest “kid’s” movies I can remember seeing in a while.

In the end, Jack Flack, who represents the idealized dream father figure as a replacement for Davey’s distant, workaholic real father, dies and fades away.  He is killed not by the bullets of the enemy, but by Davey’s own realization that spy adventures have real-life consequences, and that he can’t treat life as a game anymore.  Shortly thereafter, when Davey is held hostage at the airport, his father both figuratively and literally becomes the hero that he’d imagined for himself, volunteering to go in alone undercover and using the name “Jack Flack” to identify himself to his son.  The elder Osborne transforms into the action hero in truth, escaping from the fiery destruction of the plane and walking back to his son in a perfect 80s image of the badass hero illuminated by the flames of his exploits.  Davey has survived a real adventure with a fake hero, and earned the real one.

So yeah, I was quite surprised by this one.  It was way darker and more violent than I’d remembered, and actually had a fair bit to say about real world violence and its relationship to movie-bred fantasies.  I’d wager it’s one that not a lot of people have heard of, so I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

Nostalgia: B-

Rewatch: B+

Stray Thoughts:

-Okay, that review turned out a lot more essay-ish than I’d intended, so these thoughts might be a little longer than usual to fit in anything that I left out.

-I thought Henry Thomas was quite good in this film.  His friend, Kim (played by Christina Nigra), however, not so much.  I like how she’s written, as she clearly doesn’t have time for Davey’s spy shit from the beginning, and even after being successfully rescued is willing to keep tabs on him via walkie talkie.  However, I found the performance itself to be pretty flat and lifeless overall.

-The movie makes great use of San Antonio landmarks, becoming a virtual travelogue of the city.  There are major set-pieces at the Alamo, River Walk, Japanese Sunken Garden and Tower Life building.

-It was a little odd seeing William Forsythe, best known for playing gangster villains, in the role of Morris, the ill-fated computer and D&D geek who runs Davey’s Cloak & Dagger tabletop RPG.

-Yes, I know that it’s the 1980s, the middle of summer and Davey’s father is a single parent.  I still found it odd that no one at all remarked on a pre-teen kid running all over downtown San Antonio on his own, even before he started being chased by guys with guns.

-I typed "Jack Black" more than once while writing up this review.  Now that would be a different movie entirely.