“Do you guys have any computers with Internet?”

Justin’s rating: Bye, bye Miss American Pie. Drove my smoothie to the movie, and I can’t help but cry.

Justin’s review: If you’re a bad indie film director, chances are you’ll either opt for gritty urban life or schlock horror, as both downtown slums and ketchup are easy to come by. If you’re a bad indie film director, you’ll pick your cast from your “friends” who will act on the same level as “ferrets” and swear far more than is necessary. If you’re a bad indie film director, your product will look like it was shot with a phone (since it probably was), it’ll reek of self-importance, and it won’t be of much entertainment value except for the director him or herself.

Alex Pucci is just one of a thousand such directors. The real shame is that the boy had a spark of a good idea behind Camp Slaughter (formerly titled Camp Daze), but he tripped, stumbled, lost his balance, and crashed the same pit in which his amateur peers lurk.

The sole reason I gave this film a shot is that the concept — Friday the 13th mixed with Groundhog Day — got my attention. Intrigued? A group of four highly unsavory teenagers are taking a trip through Maine only to find themselves stalled out in the middle of a summer camp that’s been stuck in 1981 for 24 years. Each day, this camp relives the same experience; namely a lot of happy time followed by a mysterious killer slaughtering half the residents. After this, the day resets, people are back alive again, and it goes on. With the arrival of the kids from our era, the counselors and new arrivals have to work together, through confusing scene transitions, to break the curse.

I like that. Given a proper budget and talent, it could be a nice niche hit. Unfortunately, an idea is all Camp Slaughter has. Well, an idea and a bag full of F-bombs to sprinkle here, there and everywhere.

The acting is uniformly awful. Dreadful. Words spill out of these people’s mouths so unconvincingly that you can’t help but notice that you’d be far better off playing all of the roles, yourself, in a sort of one-person play. The characters are just cardboard stereotypes — but even these aren’t played well. You will find yourself cringing at the ’80s Valley Girl trying to recall what ’80s lingo was (I don’t think this actress was born before 1994, anyway), and you will outright loathe the shrill girl who is aiming for “sassy” and ends up smack in the middle of “off-putting.”

It doesn’t help, either, that the director feels the need to push the camera up into the face of everyone talking. Not only is that unnatural and gives me way too much information about the state of their nasal passages, but it instantly repelled me about forty feet away from my television screen.

While the idea of the time warp day is good — in theory — this movie spends far, far too much time building up to it and then wastes the concept with only one repeat day shown. It’s seriously about an hour of the kids going around camp for a single day, tension slowly building as they make a nonstop string of Jason Vorhees references. Follow that up with kids being slaughtered with no sound effects (which lessens the effect more than you’d think), arts and crafts, and even a stage production of Shakespeare. Really. Finally, after an hour or so, the day repeats and we get into the meat of the plot, which turns out to be a stew of confusing elements that never quite gel before the final credits.

It’s far from scary or tense, and let’s be honest: the only laughs this film is going to get is from Pucci’s former associates as they leave his house, doubled over in hysterics.