It’s week #8 of Camp Crappabuttawipe at B-Movie Enema!

I think we’ve been on a pretty good run over the entirety of this summer camp business we’ve had going on as of late. Okay, sure, you can potentially say the two Sleepaway Camp sequels are far behind the best of the best thus far in the theme season, but… They weren’t thaaaat bad, were they? Ernest Goes to Camp, while far from Shakespeare, and I mean Todd Shakespeare from Corydon, Indiana (who did you think I was referring to?), it was fun reliving a part of my beloved childhood before I grew up and realized the world kinda sucks shit.

Largely, we’re on a hot streak with the likes of Little Darlings being kind of a revelation, Marshmallow being an excellent micro-budget gem, Meatballs being a movie that gave the world of cinema Bill Murray and Harold Ramis working perfectly together, and Wet Hot American Summer.

Well, it’s time to fuck that shit up for a couple of weeks… Yeah, we’re in the back half of Camp Crappabuttawipe, and these long, hot summer days are starting to signal that feeling inside when you really just want to go the fuck home. You’re tired of archery. You’re tired of making wallets and other leather-working stuff. You’re fucking sick of that muddy-ass lake you toss yourself into without the knowledge of whether there are leeches waiting to grab hold of your scrotum. We need to dig deep and just power through because I’m starting to feel like I really frontloaded this theme series.

So, maybe appropriately, this week’s movie is 1988’s Twisted Nightmare.

Twisted Nightmare is largely forgotten, even by horror fans, even by camp horror fans. I think a big part of this is because this movie was made by almost nobody you know. The writer/director of this movie is Paul Hunt. Who’s Paul Hunt? I don’t know. Twisted Nightmare was his second-to-last directing credit, and he made 14 total in his career! I don’t know ANY of the other movies he made, though I think I know what Merlin is because I think I saw it at the video store I worked at in the 90s. Nothing else he made in this quarter-century career rings any kind of bells for me.

What’s more, this movie has all sorts of really silly shenanigans going on with it that almost show that maybe no one really cared about this movie’s quality. Originally, the movie was written with the title of Ancient Evil. Renaming a movie from its original copyrighted script to what it would be released as is nothing new or egregious. But the movie’s opening title shows a copyright date of 1982. The movie’s actual copyright year was 1987. They didn’t even bother getting that right. On top of that, the movie’s full copyright date was March 6, 1987. But if you notice the title of this article, it’s listed as 1988. That’s because it didn’t get released until 1988… September to be exact. That means they had a year-and-a-fuckin’-half to correct the opening title. They did not.

There isn’t much more to talk about the origin or the behind-the-scenes bits that make up why this movie exists. There are a couple of bits about Friday the 13th: Part III that I will call out when we get to it. Also, Orson Welles’ cinematographer on the long-shelved The Other Side of the Wind also shot this movie. So, it might have some interesting angles or shots? Eh… Anyway, let’s find out for ourselves what’s going on with Twisted Nightmare.

So, right away, get a couple of pieces of information that can possibly suit us well throughout this movie. First, this is not just any ol’ camp slasher movie. Nope! This is a supernatural camp slasher movie. There’s an entity on the grounds of Camp Paradise. A voice-over tells us it’s an “evil power” that resides here. Additionally, for 80s horror aficionados, you will immediately recognize this Southern California location, where the film is being shot:

Yeah, this is where Friday the 13th Part III was shot. That’s the house the counselors stayed at while we’re looking at it from the barn, where pretty much all the best stuff happened in the movie. This includes the big climax of the girl fighting off Jason, something that will be referenced later in this movie. Does that mean that this movie has some pedigree?

Well, maybe not because we all know that Friday the 13th Part III is kind of a weak entry, but I digress.

The early parts of this movie are kind of lore-heavy. After the credits, we have what appears to be a ghostly reenactment of a Native American demon possessing a guy who seems to be something of an elder in a tribe, a young woman, and a young man as they are being burned at the stake, and each person this thing inhabits is a warning that this evil spirit will not perish so easily. We then see our lead character, Laura, played by Rhonda Gray, waking up from a dream. I think it’s implied that the spirit is reaching out to her through the dream, maybe? But she wakes up and seems a little less than feelin’ fine, but her eyeliner is on freakin’ point.

She wakes up and looks at an invitation she has on her bedside table telling her she’s won a free weekend at Camp Paradise. This was the camp she attended as a little girl. She invites her boyfriend, Shawn, to come with her. She’s not the only one who received this invitation. Several friends of hers have as well. Among this group are her friends Jennifer and Tak. Also, there are couples who arrive at the camp as well, including Nicole and Jerome, Gus and Sylvia, Ken and Julie, Jeff and Nancy, and Dean and Cheri.

This is a giant cast. But this is a bit of a reunion of sorts. A couple of years before, Laura’s mentally handicapped brother died under some mysterious circumstances. So while she is happy to see some of her friends and be reunited with them, she’s a little uneasy about this situation. It’s not even clear who invited them to this “Free Weekend.”

So, one, people aren’t sure who invited them to this free weekend deal. Two, after the first couple arrived, the groundskeeper locked the front gate, forcing the rest of this giant party to park at the front gate and hike three miles to get to the cabin when they probably should have been, you know, allowed in if they were here under normal circumstances. Three, and maybe the most important thing of all, Laura’s got some pretty complicated feelings about this campsite. Feelings she’s not told her boyfriend, Shawn. In fact, it’s her close friends Gus and Sylvia who discover that Shawn has no idea about any part of Laura’s history with this place and what happened to her brother. Adding to that, Sylvia is quick to shrug and say, “It wasn’t our fault what happened here two years ago!”

So this is an inauspicious start to this weekend. They are at a creepy cabin where bad shit went down in the past, and the gate was locked, making this seem like either they aren’t supposed to be here or preventing them from making an easy escape. Gus and Sylvia seem to be especially tipped off that things are a little odd with this whole deal. But before they can decide what they want to do, they need to go to the famous Friday the 13th Part III barn and fuck and debate whether Sylvia should take some feral barn kittens home with her since she owns a bird.

Before they can get their rocks off, the groundskeeper pulls Gus off Sylvia. He tells them that they are not allowed to be in the barn. He’s pretty damn upset about this. He tells them multiple times to stay out of the barn. Additionally, he tells them he NEEDS these kittens for mousin’. After he kicks them out of the barn, Gus tells Sylvia that they’ll grab a kitten on their way out in the morning. So they have already decided to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Inside, we learn some more about our characters. Laura is saying hi to everyone and asking if they’ve met her boyfriend, who she is constantly leaving to himself in the corner of the room, which is the most conducive way of meeting people, just standin’ in the corner drinkin’ a cold one. Anyway, she proudly tells her friend it took her SIX WHOLE MONTHS to finally get Shawn. That’s… That does not matter at fucking all. I do not care. Tak, played by Darryl Tong, who might be way in over his head with this acting business, just blurts out that this group of friends haven’t been all together in the same place since her brother was killed here.

I’m starting to worry that Shawn is just going to be standing in a corner, drinking cold ones, while people will just come up to him and reveal more and more of his girlfriend’s traumatic backstory.

Meanwhile, Sylvia is a moron. Well, okay… Maybe she isn’t a moron. She’s obsessed with the barn kittens. She decides she’s not going to wait for the morning, she’s gonna get one of those goddamn kittens tonight! She goes back to the barn, gets a surprised look on her face, then, in slow motion, she appears to be lifted off her feet or thrown or something. It’s not until Gus returns to the barn to look for her that we see what happened. She’s been hanged in the barn by a hulking, snarling beast of a dude. This giant grabs Gus and rips the poor dude’s arm off as he kills him.

Back at the main cabin, there’s a drawing for which rooms will be taken by which person or couple. Additionally, there’s a whole separate cabin that one lucky couple will have to themselves. After the drawing, a mustachioed grunt of a yokel gets mad over getting one of the rooms in the shared house instead of the private cabin. So he threatens to beat up the guy who won the cabin. He then says he and his girlfriend, Cheri, are going to leave in the morning because fuck this and fuck Laura’s brother; he never liked that guy anyway.

The couple in the private cabin had a night full of sex and debauchery with the big hulking guy watching from the treeline. The next morning, Dean and Cheri leave while some of the group decide to hike in one direction, while Laura and Jennifer go hiking, and Tak and Shawn go hunting. I like that when Dean leaves, he comes storming out of the cabin, calls everyone losers, and then says that Gus and Sylvia had the right idea about leaving last night. He then yanks Cheri to his car, the only car that made it all the way to the cabin, gets in, and then pulls up to the front porch of the cabin to tell everyone how they can be lame and play in the dirt; he’s leaving to go back to civilization.

Yeah, Dean… We got it. You’re leaving. This is what happens when you feather your hair and grow an aggressive moustache that only 70s porn could love.

Ken and Julie are left back at the cabin. Ken decides to pay a visit to the groundskeeper, Kane. Exactly why? He wants to know what’s going on around here… I guess. He does recognize that things seem kinda fishy. Julie wanders about and ends up in the cabin, where she finds Gus and Silvia’s bodies. She tries calling the sheriff, but he’s totally worthless. She attempts to get away from the killer, only for him to catch up to her and kill her.

While hunting, Tak tells Shawn the whole story about how everyone knows each other and what this mysterious business is around Laura’s brother’s death. He says that they were all in high school together, and every summer they would come to this camp. On the day that her brother, Matthew, died, the guys were playing football while Laura was camping, and all the girls looked after Matthew. They start kind of teasing Matthew about liking girls. It gets… weird. The girls ask if Matthew wants to go inside and play doctor. The guys all tell Matthew he’d better check himself before he wrecks himself. Matthew runs off, saying that everyone is bad.

He runs to the barn. There, he sees a glowing red light. He starts screaming, and it’s soon revealed that he is on fire. This is revealed just as Laura returned to the cabin. Tak says everyone saw him burning, but no one ever found his body. What’s especially strange is that Matthew was the only thing from inside the barn that was burning. The friend group became estranged at that point until the invitation came.

Ken finds Kane in a different barn on the campgrounds. Kane refuses to discuss or claim to know anything about what happened two years ago to Matthew. He does know they shouldn’t have returned to the camp. Either way, they need to leave immediately.

Ken does just that. He hoofs it back to the cabin to get the hell out of there. On the way, he accidentally gets trapped by one of the bear traps that Kane put out in the woods. Ken manages to get back to the cabin after freeing himself from the bear trap. However, the killer catches up to him and slashes his throat with his claws. Ken falls dead just as Jennifer and Laura return to the cabin.

While Laura takes a shower, Jennifer decides to make some punch, but has to go to the icehouse to get ice. I think we all know what’s about to happen here. Yup, she’s gonna break up some ice with an ice pick. Oh, and someone is going to lock her in the icehouse. But what is interesting during this sequence is what Laura is doing. We think that while she takes a shower, she will be shaving her legs with a straight razor. You know the thing all women use to shave their leg hairs.

Yeah, this is maybe the most interesting thing in the whole movie. She cuts her inner thighs to hide the scars under pants and skirts, but she seems to be this almost perfect girl. She’s well put together. She’s friendly with everyone. She seemingly doesn’t think her friends were at all to blame for her brother’s emulation and subsequent death… Right?

That’s not all she does. She set up these black candles in the bathroom while she showered. When she gets out of the shower, she kneels in front of the toilet and one of the flames as if she’s performing some sort of ritual.

Speaking of hoofing it back to the camp, it looks like someone poured sugar into Dean’s car’s gas tank. Smartly, Dean brings the hunting rifle from the trunk of his car. I’m sure that will be helpful later. And speaking of hunting, Shawn and Tak find a mutilated carcass of an animal. Tak figures that it wasn’t an animal that did that because there are boot tracks next to whatever this was. They had better get back to the cabin just in case whoever did this is ready to hunt some people.

The old Sheriff comes out to the campgrounds to follow up on the strange call he received from Julie. Things really start to ramp up from this point forward. Jerome, Nicole, Jeff, and Nancy decide to go to the sauna. Jerome takes a dip in the lake only to be chased by the killer with a machete after the killer had bludgeoned Nicole to death in the sauna. When the killer catches up to Jermone in the sauna, he uses the hot stones to kill Jerome.

The Sheriff, after getting all his questions answered as best he could by a strange-acting Laura (who bids the Sheriff a suspicious goodbye when he drove off), finds Dean and Cheri and offers them a ride back to the cabin. Tak decides to go look for Jennifer, ultimately freeing her from the ice house. Tak is killed by way of pickaxe to the head, and Jennifer flees after shooting the killer in the arm.

The killer eventually comes across the Sheriff, who rips the old man’s head off with his bare fucking hands. The killer then sneaks up on Dean, bending his rifle as if it were made of rubber. To kill Dean, the killer SUMMONS FUCKING LIGHTNING FROM THE SKY TO ELECTROCUTE HIM. That’s some pretty serious powers he’s got there. Back at the cabin, Cheri is frightened by loud banging noises all around the outside and inside of the cabin. She tries to barricade herself in one of the bedrooms, but the killer busts into the bedroom and eventually impales Cheri on a pair of antlers on the wall.

Alright, so it’s time to connect some dots here, I think. Kane confronts Laura and tells her she should never have come back, and he’s got to stop her. He throttles Laura, but Shawn arrives to shoot Kane. Laura explains to Shawn that everyone else is dead. They can be together. The killer is her brother, Matthew. He was possessed by the demonic entity that curses this land. Kane’s grandfather placed a curse on the land after white men took the land from the tribe. So this presence is able to possess people, and it makes them these hulking, unstoppable killer creatures. Laura used her brother to get revenge on her friends for killing Matthew. Kane, not quite yet dead, is alive enough to have Jennifer use the Sheriff’s car to escape while he blows up the barn with himself, Laura, and Matthew still locked inside.

However, after the barn is completely destroyed, it eventually restores itself as if nothing had happened at all.

Twisted Nightmare is… pretty bad. It’s not without some potential. Like how the movie starts off with Laura a little strange, but it could be played off as her just being nervous about returning to Camp Paradise. I guess it’s kind of interesting that she was the villain behind the monster in the end. Her performance is just good enough to portray her becoming less and less detached from her friends. But the friend group is part of the major problem with this movie. There are way too many characters. I know they are just being led to the slaughter, but this is a little ridiculous after a while. They don’t have discernible personalities enough to remember all their names. I especially didn’t learn to feel sympathy for them being killed.

I’m a tad curious about a few things. I tend to have Wikipedia pulled up while I am going through a movie because I want to make sure I get a character’s name right or fully understand what happened from one pretty big plot point to the next. I wonder if this movie has multiple versions. I watched this movie on YouTube. It doesn’t look fuzzy, necessarily, but it can, at times, look very dark. On Wikipedia, it is said that the characters of Nancy and Jeff were killed while having sex outside the sauna by way of being impaled by a pole. I… did not see that scene. It could be what was uploaded to YouTube, or it could be something else, but if it is in the version I watched, it was so dark I had no idea what happened.

I also didn’t particularly care about the cursed Indian land the camp was set upon. The cursed Indian burial ground or tribal site, etc. feels so much like a cheat. Need something supernatural? Make it Native American mysticism! It doesn’t need explanation beyond that! I do like the supernatural stuff. It does create a different angle to work from, but there’s nothing explained. That’s supposedly another thing from Wikipedia that I didn’t see (Kane supposedly explains that stuff about the cursed land and the possession by the spirit). But it didn’t feel well explored or explained.

I mentioned that the most interesting thing is that Laura was revealed to be cutting herself in the shower. That’s far more compelling to see her as someone who is dealing with some pretty serious trauma, leading to her doing this ritual to bring her brother back to kill her friends, whom she’s harbored a lot of anger for. That’s maybe what’s going on here? But why does Kane know about all this? Again, that scene is missing about how his grandfather’s cursing of the land, etc.

Too many characters. Confusing plot. Better ideas unexplored. Boring. This movie is kind of a perfect storm of pretty forgettable. But I don’t have to remember it anymore. I can go to the campfire tonight with my buds and my best gal and get fucking trucked by a solid case of beer while we tell stories of creepy spooky shit.

I think the tale I’ll tell will be what we’re going to be reviewing next week. Join me in seven days for the ultimate campfire story – Madman Marz. That’s right, it’s 1981’s Madman. So let’s call his name out and then try to scramble for our lives to avoid being maimed and killed by this burly, hairy, backwoodsman!