Here it is! The first shot-on-video horror flick of this year’s Horrorshow. And it’s a good one…relatively speaking.
From way back in 1988 comes Cannibal Campout, from directors Tom Fisher and Jon McBride, working from a screenplay by McBride. No misdirection in the title with this flick. There is a campout, and there are cannibals.
The woods of New Jersey are the setting, as they are in many a horror flick. Four college students, Jon (McBride, who also produced and edited), Carrie (Carrie Lindell), Chris (Christopher A. Granger, who also handled sound, music, and was a camera assistant), and Amy (Amy Chludzinski) head off into the wilderness of New Jersey for a weekend away from the rigors of college life.
In the middle of nowhere they get into a mild road rage incident with creepy backwoods brothers Gene and Rich (Gene Robbins and Richard Marcus). The group gets away unscathed, but they’re unsettled. As they should be. No surprise, Gene and Rich, and another fellow decked out in flight suit and helmet named Joe (Joseph Salhab, who also handled the effects) are cannibals. After the happy campers get settled amongst the decrepit ruins of some old cabins, the cannibals stalk and murder them for their Sunday victuals.
Four potential victims isn’t enough to pass the time in a slasher flick that clocks in at 88 minutes, so the filmmakers made sure to throw us a couple of victims early before the main action picks up about halfway through. What follows is what one would expect from an SOV horror flick made for about a buck and a half. Most of the movie 
has the look and feel of friends playing at making a movie. There’s little attention paid to continuity, everything feels unrehearsed, and the gore is nasty but unconvincing. It’s amateurish, and that’s perfectly fine. Yet, this movie has proper editing, and Granger’s soundtrack, while nothing spectacular, is better than many I’ve heard from low budget Hollywood productions.
SOV horror is meant for a particular audience — one that doesn’t turn up its nose when certain minimum thresholds of quality are not met. A movie like this wasn’t made for an easy buck (that’s what distributors are for). It was made for love of movies, horror in particular, and that always seems to come through in flicks like this.
The most life in Cannibal Campout comes from Marcus and Robbins. They bounce off each other all movie, doing their best to one-up each other’s depravity, leading to a finale that’s more shocking in its idea rather than its execution…but, again, SOV horror. Marcus was born with some form of congenital limb defect, and he used his slight deformity to effect, adding to his character’s creepiness. At times he could have dialed back his antics, but he did make it easy to believe he was a forest-crawling cannibal.
No new ground is broken with this movie. Horror veterans will have seen it all before, and the lack of quality in the production will be a turnoff to many viewers. This movie exists for the entertainment of the mutants among us, and there it shines, being one of the best SOV horror movies I’ve seen. It’s up against many, many better movies in the Watchability Index, though. It slots into the bottom half of the Index, no surprise, taking over the #305 spot from The Legend of Boggy Creek.